


World Without End

by diasterisms



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Hades and Persephone in Space, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kylo "how dare you kinkshame me in my own subconscious" Ren, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, that awkward moment when Force-choking is the way to a man's heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-16 18:19:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8112499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms
Summary: We are one when together.We are one when parted.We will share all.We will raise warriors.- Mandalorian marriage law





	1. CLOTHO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a canon-compliant retelling of _Hades and Persephone_ for [Keeping the Stars Apart](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/), a collection of Reylo stories based on various myths and fairy tales. Huge shout-out to the [mods](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/Editors) who worked so hard to put this project together; in particular, I'd like to thank [Jen](http://lariren-shadow.tumblr.com/), [Mneme](http://mnemehoshiko.tumblr.com/), and [Viv](http://shelikespretties.tumblr.com/) for being wonderfully thorough and supportive in their editing. Smooches as well to [Anna](http://stokerindia.tumblr.com/), my beta-reader, good friend, and flawless [mix](http://8tracks.com/annakedavra/satellite-heart)-maker.
> 
> I've already finished this _twenty-thousand-word smutfest barely held together by a fragile sham of a plot,_ which I'll be updating every few days or so, but I do still ~~crave~~ welcome any comments and suggestions y'all might have!

The ship is called _Underworld,_ and Rey is going to blow it up in exactly five minutes.

 

It's a _Punworcca 116-_ class interstellar sloop, riding the tachyon streams of the Cerberus system nestled deep in Wild Space. From her vantage point, which is above, in the pilot seat of the _Millennium Falcon,_ it resembles a bloated Gorsian dragonfly right down to the glossy red-gold hull and the delicate, tapered wings. With a length of 15.2 meters, it's dwarfed by the sail dragged along behind it on tense cables— a moon-wide veil of filmy copper-hued material, unfurled to catch the solar winds flowing from the nearby purple star of Nysa.

 

Once it has traveled beyond reach of that star's currents, the ship will retract its sail and fire up a built-in propulsion system of ultraviolet lasers— in theory, that is, because Rey will have blasted it to shreds long before that.

 

Four minutes.

 

A quick check with the _Falcon_ 's central computer assures her that all countermeasures are still in place. The freighter is too small for a cloaking device but the Carbanti package ticks away, jamming the enemy vessel's sensors. She's also using Force Immersion to spin a web of nothingness; anyone peering up from the _Underworld_ 's cabin will see only the glittering satellite-strewn wastes of this forsaken corner of the galaxy.

 

Three minutes.

 

Rey stands up and closes her eyes, gingerly prodding at the mental shields that she's learned to construct after _months_ of practice. They hold, even as the bond laps and ripples against them like an inexorable Ahch-To tide, calling out to her and searching for the slightest crack through which it can pour to submerge her once more.

 

Two minutes.

 

She casts the net of her Force sensitivity into the void; it drapes over the _Underworld_ and snags on the ship's fault lines. Holding her breath, she waits, fearing that such a move might not have gone undetected— but nothing. She's getting _good_ at this.

 

One minute.

 

Her mind is clear as air and sharp as tempered steel when she surges the Force through the weak spots in the sloop's composition. Fault lines glow red amidst the darkness of her shut eyes, vibrating like plucked electromagnetic fields as she slowly, methodically slots power into place, gearing up to rip the enemy vessel apart with one devastating telekinetic blast.

 

Three... two...

 

_Not so fast, Jedi._

 

Kriff.

 

Rey's eyes fly open as her shields disintegrate and the bond comes pulsing in. The dashboard is blinking with numerous alerts; all around her, the walls of the _Falcon_ warp and creak.

 

_Did you think you were the only one versed in the art of shatterpoint?_ sneers Kylo Ren. _Did my foolish uncle not tell you how I broke a disc of Mandalorian iron when I was thirteen? He must have forgotten or he would not have sent you to assassinate me in such a manner._

 

She clenches her teeth but holds her peace. It's taking most of her focus to maintain her grasp on his ship— she can't shut him out again but neither will she give him the satisfaction of feeling her squirm as he inspects her mind at his leisure.

 

_Luke Skywalker doesn't know._ Kylo's delight is a brilliant and wicked thing, flaring through the bond. _He has no idea that you've chased me halfway across the galaxy. Disobedience is a fine look on you, scavenger._

 

She lets a few seconds tick by in cold silence. This seems to annoy him, because he continues, with a hint of churlishness, _Had enough of meditation and lifting pebbles I take it?_

 

_Had enough of_ you, she retorts.

 

And she _pulls_ him in, lets him feel the lash of the rage that has been building up ever since his father fell to the white-smoke depths, the manner in which she has been slowly cracking apart with his constant presence inside her head; the absolute _desperation_ that has driven her to this point. When he attempts to retreat she latches on like a sand burrower tunneling deep beneath the desert. She _drowns_ him in all of it, in the same way that the bond drowns her.

 

_Enough,_ Kylo snarls. _Enough or I will tear your ship to pieces._

 

A tremor passes through the _Falcon_ 's hull like a warning shot, the duralloy plates clinking as they shift away from one another. Narrowing her eyes, Rey sends a tremor to run along the _Underworld_ 's fault lines as well. _Want to make a race of it?_ she jeers.

 

Through their strange, repulsive connection she sees him more clearly than she wants to. He's standing in the center of a main cabin as ostentatious as the sloop's exterior, all done up in blazing swatches of gold and crimson, the transparisteel viewports like black velvet panels twinkling with thousands of silver stars. Dressed in full battle regalia, he has one long arm extended in front of him, gloved palm turned up to the ceiling. He mirrors her current position; her own palm faces down, in order for her to have a better hold on his ship.

 

_It appears that we are at a stalemate,_ he dryly comments. _I don't suppose that you would be amenable to us disengaging and going our separate, merry ways?_

 

_Get spaced,_ she snaps.

 

_We're about to, unfortunately,_ he sighs. _Might I suggest an alternative?_

 

She waits. One of the many things that she has reluctantly learned about this man is that he likes the sound of his own voice. Stars, if the Resistance can just lock him in a room somewhere he'll probably end up detailing the First Order's master plan if they let him ramble on long enough.

 

_We are near my private worldcraft,_ he continues. _I propose that we put your new blade to the test, on solid ground. Let us settle this, once and for all, in the old-fashioned way._

 

_I'm not going_ anywhere _with you._ She crooks her little finger; far below her the _Underworld_ trembles.

 

An answering quake reverberates through the _Falcon._ The alarms shriek.

 

_I see your mind,_ he hisses. _I see your heart. You would bring about your own doom as well as mine, if it meant an end to the bond. Rather a waste for two to perish when only one need fall, don't you agree?_

 

_I feel everything you feel,_ she croaks. _I dream your dreams. What if death is shared through the bond? To run my lightsaber through you might be to kill myself as well._

 

_Then we die like warriors,_ he says brusquely, _instead of choking on space dust._

 

When she doesn't reply, he persists with a hint of cruelty, _You promised FN-2187 that the two of you will see each other again. Now that you've boxed yourself into a corner, don't you want to take whatever slim chance there is—_

 

Without warning she plunges further into his head. He stiffens but does not resist as she echoes down his hallways and takes whatever she wants. While they've marginally improved at hiding things as the months passed, they can never outright lie to each other _here._

 

Once she has satisfied herself that he's not springing a trap, she nods. _All right. I accept._

 

She feels a slight tug at the corner of her still lips. Behind the mask, Kylo Ren is smiling.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

The first time she becomes aware of the bond is on Ahch-To, a week into her training with Luke. She is cross-legged in the ruins of the Jedi Temple, spine straight, shoulders squared, and hands folded in the standard meditation pose. She has been trying to _center herself_ for days, with limited success. Jakku had been a flurry of activity— digging through scrap metal before the steelpeckers could attack, fighting off the more pernicious scavengers, fleeing from the fatal sun of high noon. A larger part of her than she cares to admit does not hold with staying put and spending hours focusing her mind on a sharp point. Only bones stay still in the desert.

 

This morning, though, something clicks into place behind her closed eyes as the salty breeze laps at her skin and the ocean waves roar in her ears. The Force flows through her like water on a wheel, spilling from head to toe. Her veins _sing_ with it. She—

 

— is standing in the corner of some dark, windowless room. The air carries that stiff, unmistakeable life-support tang. She's on a ship. Why is she on a ship?

 

Why is Kylo Ren disrobing in front of her?

 

Rey swallows the gasp that builds in her throat. She freezes amidst the shadows, almost too afraid to breathe lest he hear— but, surely, the pounding of her heart is more than audible. Surely even people one _star system_ over can register this rapid, slamming sound in the walls of her ribcage.

 

Kylo does not appear to notice her presence as he carelessly chucks his tunic to the floor, where it joins the black pool of his gloves and his hooded cloak. He's maskless, clad only in trousers and arm-guards, his pale skin a stark contrast to the midnight hue of leather and chain-mail. It is an odd intimacy to see him bare like this. She wants to squeeze her eyes shut but doesn't. She looks, and hates herself for looking.

 

Each arm-guard covers him from wrist to shoulder, ending where his clavicle begins. Her gaze is drawn, first, to this elegant line of bone, and then it wanders inexorably lower, to the smooth planes of his broad chest, to the taut muscles of his abdomen, to the sprinkling of dark hair that trails below his navel and disappears into the waistband of his trousers.

 

She is no stranger to shirtless men but none of them have been so finely sculpted. His trousers are slung low enough to reveal the sharp jut of his hipbones, tight enough to hint at what lies between his legs. She is suddenly unable to breathe for an _entirely_ different reason.

 

He turns to the bed and the spell breaks.

 

The vast expanse of skin on his back is criss-crossed with scars. Some are old and ropy, while others look as fresh as if they might burst at any second. They look like whip-marks, they look like claw-marks, tearing his flesh in jagged lines of silver and red.

 

Rey can't control her gasp this time. It escapes from her lips and her eyes widen as she claps a palm over her mouth, a move that comes too late.

 

Kylo whirls around on battle-honed instincts, one hand automatically held up to Force-stun the intruder in place. She braces herself for the inevitable numbness, the paralysis, but— nothing happens.

 

"You aren't..." His brow creases. He lowers his arm. "You aren't really here."

 

She dislikes the way he's looking at her, his head cocked to one side and his dark gaze studious and intense, as if she's a puzzle that he's trying to figure out. She glares at him in response, watching that narrow, expressive face twitch as he arrives at some sort of conclusion.

 

"Get out of my head, scavenger," he demands.

 

"I don't—" Her voice cracks. She admonishes herself for that; it wouldn't do at all to lay her panic at his feet. When she speaks again, it is through gritted teeth and over a mutinous roil in her bloodstream. "I don't know how."

 

They stare at each other.

 

*

 

Rey taps in the coordinates that Kylo feeds through the bond. The _Falcon_ moves in tandem with the _Underworld_ beneath it, straining away from the pull of the star of Nysa. She's loathe to relinquish her grip and so is he. They circle within the bond like wary animals, holding each other's ship by their shatterpoints as they float through space.

 

Idly she wonders if this constitutes a kidnapping. Again.

 

He seems affronted. _May I remind you that_ you _tried to sneak up on me and_ kill _me?_

 

_Because you killed Han._

 

He falls into a tense, brooding silence, and does not speak again for several long minutes.

 

Rey listens to the beep of sensors and the tick of chronometers in the sublight. Eventually, she becomes aware of the _Falcon_ 's A.I. humming and whirring in a jangle of discordant rhythms— a flaw that she ascribes to the cobbled-together nature of the central computer.

 

_The Hanx-Wargel mainframe was rebuilt with three droid brains,_ Kylo tells her quietly. _An R3-series astromech, a slicer, and a V-5 transport. They sometimes argue among themselves._

 

_So this freighter has an identity crisis,_ she quips.

 

_It's a mess,_ he gripes, point-blank. _A heap of junk._

 

She coaxes open the door that his thoughts have summoned. A grizzled Wookie and a nine-year-old boy pore over a board flickering with holographic pieces, while a younger Han Solo talks to someone on the Chedak transceiver.

 

It hurts to see Han like this, vibrant and alive, grinning even as he cajoles, "Aww, c'mon, Your Worship, you can spare a few days. Tell you what, the kid and I are in-system now, we'll swing by and sweep you off your feet—"

 

An exasperated sigh crackles through the audio pickup. "Han," says Leia Organa.

 

_No. This is not yours._

 

A bright, hot sear of anguish slices into Rey's temple, so vicious that she sees stars.

 

_You already take my dreams,_ Kylo growls. _I will not give you everything else._

 

It's bitterness, plain and simple, that causes her to spit out, _You already have— kid._

 

*

 

Rey has heard of worldcraft before and thought them a myth like the Jedi. To see one loom beyond the _Falcon_ 's viewport tightens her throat with an exhilaration that is as unwelcome as it is inappropriate.

 

But who _wouldn't_ be amazed? The habitation sphere is the size of a small planet, although not as perfectly circular. It resembles an asteroid, instead— rough-hewn and craggy, with a black surface crowned by the silver-blue mist of an atmosphere generated via force field, orbiting a miniature crimson sun held in place by tractor beams. The entire assemblage is a feat of engineering, a marvel of technology unique to the Imperial remnant.

 

"You people are _mad,"_ Rey says out loud. "Who the hell needs an artificial planet?"

 

_This could have been yours, too. Had you joined me._

 

Not this again. It's a tired old subject— one that has been argued back and forth across several star systems. Rey projects her irritation, and, in her mind's eye, Kylo gives a languid, one-armed shrug of surrender.

 

The worldcraft's barriers shift aside to let sloop and freighter pass. _Does this place have a name?_ she asks him.

 

_Lethe,_ he replies, as they make planetfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Clotho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotho) is the youngest of the [Three Fates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirai), responsible for spinning the thread of human life.
> 
> [Cerberus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerberus) is the hound that guards the gates of the underworld.
> 
> [Nysa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nysa_%28mythology%29) is the location where Hades seizes Persephone in the [Homeric Hymn to Demeter](http://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html).
> 
> [Lethe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe) is the River of Forgetfulness. The shades of the dead are required to drink from it in order to erase all memory of their earthly lives.
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [Punworcca 116-class interstellar sloop](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Punworcca_116-class_interstellar_sloop/Legends).
> 
> [Wild Space](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wild_Space/Legends).
> 
> [Millennium Falcon specs](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Millennium_Falcon/Legends).
> 
> [Force immersion](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_immersion).
> 
> [Shatterpoint](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shatterpoint).
> 
> [Worldcraft](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Worldcraft).


	2. LACHESIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm bowled over by the warm reception this fic has gotten. You guys are the best. I hope you'll let me know what you think of this chapter!

The bond is many things— an ocean, a whisper, a flame— but, most of the time, it is a serpent, coiled in the back of her mind and always _waiting._ It slithers and flicks when she marches down the _Falcon_ 's ramp, as if it is anticipating the proximity of the man it tethers her to.

 

He hasn't disembarked yet. She looks around, studying the terrain in preparation for their duel. The artificial planetoid is in its night cycle and, at first, she doesn't understand what she's seeing. At first, she thinks that he has tricked her and blown her ship apart, after all, leaving her to die in the cosmic wastes. Everywhere, there are stars— spread below her feet, stretched out above her head, wafting all around her. It isn't until her eyes adjust that she _realizes._

 

From space, Lethe had seemed a barren world, but they've landed in a field of grass streaked silver by twilight. The soft stems are needle-thin and reach almost to her knees, glimmering with every faint movement. There are flowers, too— clusters of bell-shaped, translucent petals that release a delicate perfume as they bob in the wind. And, oh, the wind is cool and dewy on her skin, scattering waves of sparkling pollen through the air.

 

Everything is— too much. Too shadowy and ethereal for a girl who grew up beneath the relentless sun of Jakku. Her eyes prickle with unshed tears. Has this been his scheme all along, to incapacitate her even before the battle begins?

 

_You should know by now that I always want you at your strongest, your most ruthless. I would not fight you any other way._

 

Reality comes crashing back with the sound of his thoughts in her head. How lovely it had been to forget their connection even just for a moment, to forget that he was watching her. She wonders what he saw on her face to make his tone so solemn and sincere.

 

With a thready susurrus of hydraulics, a pair of cabin doors slide open and a ramp unfolds, and Kylo Ren emerges from the bowels of the _Underworld._

 

He has removed his mask; it's tucked into the crook of his arm as he approaches her on a sea of grass and stardust, ghostly flowers glowing all around them like tiny nebulae in the dark. He stops before he is within striking distance but near enough for her to make out his features in the silver-lit gloom. It's the first time she has seen him in the flesh since a snow-edged chasm cracked open between them in a forest of dead trees and false night; he looks more or less the same, save for the rose-colored scar slanting across his face, skirting the corner of his eye and feathering below his cheek.

 

Rey should be proud of her handiwork but all she can think about are the scars on his back, especially the faded ones that had looked years old.

 

"When you lived in the desert, you marked the ship compartments that you frequented and the salvage that you found," he murmurs, contemplative— almost _academic—_ as he skims through the bond. "You are upset that someone marked me before you did." His dark eyes widen, reflecting pinpoints of celestial light. "You think this means that I do not belong to you."

 

"And what sort of thought is _that_ to be having about a monster? This has to end," Rey coldly declares. "We can't shut each other out, but we can't keep letting each other in. It's— it's _weird,_ Ren." Her hand hovers on the hilt of the lightsaber cinched to her utility belt. "Draw."

 

"Not tonight," he surprises her by saying. "Tomorrow at dawn, after we've had sufficient food and rest."

 

_"No!"_ she yells. "That was _not_ the deal!"

 

"I do not recall agreeing on a specific timeframe."

 

"You son of a—"

 

"Funny. I thought you _liked_ my mother," he interrupts, and continues speaking as she vibrates with impotent wrath. "These things must be done properly, Rey. Last time, you were untrained and I was wounded. Tonight we are both exhausted and famished after traveling so far. You spent a week trailing me, did you not? I had wondered why the bond went dark on your end. The energy it must have taken to keep your shields up for so long..." He frowns, as if he does not care to even contemplate it. "I offer you repast, before one of us strikes the final blow. I meant it when I said that I always want you at your strongest."

 

"I didn't come here for a _sleepover."_

 

"No. You came to kill me. Don't you want to ensure that you succeed?"

 

*

 

_I am making a mistake,_ Rey thinks as she follows Kylo Ren through the long grass, under a charred sky. One hand is poised on the blade-hilt at her side but the other trails its fingers along each silky blossom that she passes. Perhaps the dreaminess of this strange, starry field has seeped into her veins as well.

 

"Asphodel," he says, without turning around.

 

"What?"

 

"The flowers. That's what they're called." His black cloak flutters in the breeze, a patch of swirling midnight. "They symbolize immortality."

 

"Living forever," she muses.

 

He shrugs. "Or life after death."

 

Most of the time the bond gnaws at her like a parasite. Now, though, it is recumbent, quixotic, humming with the silvery sonata of some forgotten lullaby. The worldcraft's gravfield plates moan beneath the earth; she feels, too, the boil of the reactor core as it powers the sphere through the sublight. She keeps her gaze on the lines of his back, on the ripple of his windswept hair, as he leads her down a path that will end in no good. Stars sigh all around them. They are made of constellations.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

Three months into Rey's training, the Resistance sends five ASP-19 battle droids to Ahch-To.

 

"Don't hit them too hard," Luke advises lightly. "I know you can fix them, but we only have so many spare parts to go around. Consider it an exercise in restraint, if you will."

 

Rey spars with the droids on a crumbling stone platform raised high above an endless blue sea. Darth Vader's lightsaber sings an icy sapphire beam through the air as she slashes and spins, deflecting the high-pitched twinge of blaster bolts and slicing through the spindly limbs of the metal soldiers that besiege her from all sides. She—

 

— is dodging the spiked mace of a Knight of Ren, in an ornate black chamber dotted with triangular red crystal-lattice devices. Her scarlet crossguard cleaves through a thigh plated in black armor, and—

 

— on a sun-drenched island on a lonesome archipelago planet, Rey's arm draws back from a strike launched at an opponent that isn't _there._ She drops Vader's lightsaber and staggers to the edge of the platform, the raw brunt of her Force energy cutting down the remaining droids in a stream of smoke and sparks.

 

_"Get out of my head!"_ she screams, crouching and clawing at her temples, Sith holocrons gleaming like pyramids of blood behind her eyes. "Get out, damn you! _Get out!"_

 

If the bond had a voice, it would be laughing.

 

"Rey." Luke is standing over her. His weathered face is solemn and cautious, yet kind. "Is there anything that you want to tell me?"

 

*

 

Kylo Ren's servants are silent, misshapen things, only vaguely humanoid, with ochre skins and downcast slits of topaz for eyes. They greet Rey and their lord outside what is, quite frankly, a nightmarish castle— a bewildering, lopsided collection of sharp turrets and twisted parapets silhouetted against the night sky.

 

As he watches her take in the ghastly sight, a faint skein of thought unravels from his mind. She tugs it toward her with no hesitation, because it is hers for the taking, and examines it for several long moments. It is an image of another castle, rising along stately pillars from the barren ground of a planet coated in acid rain.

 

"I like your grandfather's fortress better," she says at last. "It has... cleaner lines. It's more elegant."

 

Kylo's lip curls. "Fortunately, I did not bring you here to review the architecture."

 

They walk into the gaping mouth of a doorway and down dim, winding halls made of onyx and bone. One of his servants takes his mask and disappears up a flight of stairs, while the rest glide along beside them like a frieze of shadows. Rey's fist tightens on her blade-hilt. She does not trust anything in this place, where Dark energy crackles within the very walls, ghosting across her skin in sensual whispers, promising sin and glory and highest delight.

 

_Nwûl tash. Dzwol shâsotkun._

 

She scowls. "What is that? Why can I hear it?"

 

"The Force calls to the darkness inside you," Kylo replies. He is matching his naturally longer stride to hers so that they are side by side. Her head barely comes up to his shoulder, which makes her uneasy for a reason that has nothing to do with fear. "The same darkness that you channeled to give me this." He taps his black-gloved forefinger to the scar on his face. "The same darkness that led you here, assassin."

 

_Wonoksh Qyâsik nun._

 

Rey floods the Light through her mind, unleashing it in a burning conflagration. The tendrils of energy that lurk in the walls rear up, outraged. _Jidai,_ they hiss, the syllables cold and grating, before they fall completely silent.

 

"Good riddance," she scoffs under her breath.

 

Kylo has stopped walking. Before she can turn an inquisitive gaze to him he grabs her by the waist, his forearms circling her effortlessly as his fingers dig into the base of her spine hard enough to bruise. He would have backed her up against the wall, had she not braced one leg behind her to resist the momentum of his body slamming into hers. As it is, they're left frozen in the middle of the hallway, her hands gripping his biceps as she glares up into his pale, angular face.

 

"The Light." He's breathing heavily, full lips slightly parted, eyes star-cut and devouring. "I have not felt it like that— in so long—"

 

His voice is a broken rasp, his lean frame hard and warm against hers. As close as this, as close as they are, she remembers him shirtless and more, she remembers the sick things that they do to each other in the dreams they share. The dreams that have been driving her mad for a year. A year, now.

 

She shoves him away. He reaches for her again before he gains control and stops himself. "The Light was yours, once," she mocks. "Had you not betrayed those who loved you."

 

*

 

The dining room is as eerie as what she has seen so far of his fortress: jagged columns gilded by the starlight pouring in through tall, wide windows. The table seems to have been carved from the iron fossil of some vast beast— a predator, judging from the wicked claws splayed over a carpet the color of old blood.

 

Kylo takes his place at the head of the table. Rey would have sat at the opposite end had his servants not quickly whisked away every other chair except for the one directly on his left.

 

"Really?" she huffs.

 

"Indulge a man on what might be his last night, _cyar'ika."_

 

Her hand whips up; he manages a grunt before the Force constricts around his throat. "Do not call me that. Not here in the real world," she warns. "You know I _hate_ it when you call me that, and now I can actually do something about it."

 

He does not flail wildly as she thought he would, as people usually do when their airway is being cut off. Instead, one hand presses its fingers into the surface of the table, while the other grips the armrest of his chair, as if he is anchoring himself. His dark eyes stare at her hungrily from a face that is blooming gradual splotches of red. The power is a rich, electric thrill coursing through her veins. She likes holding his life in her hands. When she towered over him in the snow as he gasped and bled at her feet, she'd liked it even then.

 

There is a sudden, hot throb between her thighs. _I'm going crazy,_ Rey thinks, for what seems like the millionth time this past year, her gaze close to helpless as it stays fixed on Kylo Ren. _You are making me crazy._

 

She lets him go. He sags back in the chair, his spine arching as he slowly inhales a much-needed breath. His eyes remain glued to her the whole time, although they lower to half-mast, his long lashes fanning shadows over the beauty marks atop his cheeks. His tongue runs along the pink swell of his bottom lip.

 

The bond sighs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Lachesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachesis_%28mythology%29) is the second of the Fates, who measures the thread spun by Clotho and decides how much time on earth is apportioned to each human being.
> 
> [Asphodel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphodelus#Mythology) has many connections to the mythology of death and afterlife. The [Asphodel Meadows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphodel_Meadows) is a section of the underworld where ordinary souls are sent to live after death.
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [ASP-19 battle droid](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/ASP-19_battle_droid).
> 
> [Holocron](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Holocron/Legends).
> 
> [Bast Castle](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bast_Castle), Darth Vader's fortress on the planet [Vjun](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vjun/Legends).
> 
> _Nwûl tash. Dzwol shâsotkun_ is a line from the [Code of the Sith](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Code_of_the_Sith), meaning, "Peace is a lie, there is only passion," while _Wonoksh Qyâsik nun_ means "The Force shall free me." _Jidai_ is ancient Sith for "Jedi." Those of you who have read my other work, [Shatterpoint](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6092611/chapters/13965037), will know what _cyar'ika_ means, but in this fic I'm saving the reveal for the sake of Dramatic Effect (TM).


	3. ATROPOS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mod Omnom over at the [Reylo Art Anthology](http://reyloanthology.tumblr.com/) recently e-mailed me my spreads for the upcoming [collaboration](http://reyloanthology.tumblr.com/post/150675930755/a-taste-of-whats-to-come-project-ft-keeping) and I am SO EXCITED, it looks great! I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to [ariespsyche](http://ariespsyche.tumblr.com/) and [nemling](http://nemling.tumblr.com/), the two wonderfully talented artists that I was lucky enough to be partnered with for this project. I can't wait for you guys to see what they've been working on.
> 
> This fic has a new tag courtesy of [UnderMoonlit_Skies](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/77392562), and [meritmut](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/77396156) has #destroyed me with [a song rec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcnck5aAewM) as per usual.
> 
> In this chapter, things get **explicitly sexual** with warnings for **blood, mild dom/sub undertones, and borderline dubious consent**. Please be guided accordingly. Comments would be very much appreciated!

His grotesque servants noiselessly weave in and out of the dining room until the table is loaded with a veritable feast. Her mouth waters at the array of smoked terrafin loin and spiced aric tongues and Chandrilian tendermeat bathed in a velvety, aromatic sauce. There is a dish of roasted fern potatoes as well, and a tureen of Xachibik broth, and an arrangement of pears drizzled with Dantooine cane syrup. A jewel-toned wine is poured into her goblet by deformed hands.

 

Kylo piles his plate high and then holds knife and fork at the ready, the look on his face patient yet expectant. She realizes that he's politely waiting for her to start eating— that he won't take a single bite until she does so herself. The General has taught her son well; it's almost endearing.

 

And therein lies the problem. Nothing he does is supposed to be endearing. This is not two friends sharing a meal together and Rey will die before she acts like it is.

 

She fishes out a brick of mossy green veg-meat from the satchel at her hip, taking great pleasure in his palpable annoyance as she bites into one.

 

"I did not bring you here to poison you," he snaps.

 

"Maybe I just don't want to eat your food," she blithely replies.

 

"The wine, at least." He's eyeing the veg-meat with genteel horror. "It will help wash down... whatever that is."

 

Sadly, the dry and crumbly veg-meat _does_ require liquid in order to be swallowed without leaving prickly lumps in one's throat. She lifts the goblet to her lips and is pleasantly surprised by the honey-sweetness of the drink and the lavender aftertaste that lingers on her palate.

 

It is a dear but futile hope that they will get through dinner in absolute silence. True enough, once he has polished off his broth and started on the potatoes, he asks her, "Do you know why this exists between us?"

 

_Do you understand?_ is what he does not say, but she hears it in their connection, feels it in his heart's languorous beat.

 

"It happened on Starkiller Base," she replies. _When you took the ocean from my head and I found Darth Vader in the knots of your soul._

 

Kylo nods. "In the days of the Old Republic, the Force-bond was a common occurrence between _master_ and _apprentice."_ There is a pointed emphasis, likely because he's thinking of how she'd rebuffed him in the snow in such a vicious manner. "It was also known to materialize between Force-sensitives who were..." He trails off, somewhat moodily.

 

_Lovers,_ Rey supplies, a mental broadcast because she can't say it out loud, either. "Luke told me already. He says that this is the only time he's heard of a bond being forged by accident and he thinks it happened because you were my first real contact with the Force." _Your grandfather's lightsaber called to me, but_ you _showed me how energy can be moved— and turned against someone else._ "I retaliated too intensely, without the proper mental shielding that should have accompanied such an attempt." _And thus we tore a part of each other away and kept it for ourselves._

 

He's busy chewing on a fastidious piece of tendermeat, but he continues the conversation in their heads. _I am glad that you realize that this is your fault._

 

She glowers at him. "Luke _also_ says that, even though I pushed back too hard, _you_ were the one who pushed too deep." _He says that you should have known better._

 

Kylo takes a sip of wine. "Perhaps I should have."

 

*

 

A memory:

 

The first dream of hers that he appears in is a recurring nightmare from her childhood. Amidst Jakku's swirling sands, she dangles down the side of an MC140 _Scythe-_ class battle cruiser, the grappling hook of her fibercord scraping at the tail of the ship that had crashed nose-first into the dunes. Her pickaxe is a rudimentary implement fashioned from scrap metal but the cruiser's hatch is rusty and laser-scorched and gives way after a few well-placed strikes.

 

Black feathers erupt from the hole that she's made. Sharp claws and beaks of iron tear at her flesh as grating caws fill her ears. This isn't how it happened; Teng Malar was the one who died like this while Rey watched, too small and too slow to help.

 

She screams anyway.

 

Her fingers slip from the fibercord and she plummets through hot, dusty air. The steelpeckers follow her down, like a comet's trail of wings, and, if her bones don't snap when she hits the ground, surely they will finish her off with their talons, and—

 

She lands in the cradle of a pair of strong, solid arms. It should be impossible to be caught from free-fall in this manner but— this is a dream. He leans over her, his shoulders the roof of her world, his back her shield as the birds descend upon them. _Monster, let me go,_ she wants to say, but, instead, she clutches at the fabric around his neck with both fists and closes her eyes. He is unmasked and shuddering above her, his blood spattering her face in warm rivers of red.

 

"Wake up," he tells her.

 

"I can't," she says.

 

He sinks to one knee at the weight of the birds that descend upon them, the torn edges of his black cowl splaying over the golden sand. _"Mhi solus tome."_ His voice is calm, despite the rain of beaks and claws. _"Mhi solus dar'tome."_

 

_"Mhi me'dinui an,"_ she whispers, because, again, this is a dream. _"Mhi ba'juri verde."_

 

She wakes up with the taste of his blood in her mouth.

 

*

 

After dinner he leads her up a flight of twisted, labyrinthine steps. The balustrade is the notched spine of another huge, long-dead creature, polished smooth and cold to the touch. There are no glow-panels on the walls and she wonders how it is that the starlight on Lethe can be enough to see by.

 

"This is your room for the night," Kylo announces, stopping at one door in the middle of a vast hallway. "There is a refresher unit inside and a plate of leftovers on the table, should you wish for something more satisfying than dehydrated protein."

 

They had _just_ left the dining room and she hadn't heard him give any orders. She prods the bond. Ah. His servants have their own secret passageways throughout the castle and they are telepathically linked to their master in a way that allows them to anticipate his whims without a single word spoken. Her own connection to him is winding lazily around them both. She thinks once more of serpents; thinks of being pressed up against his body in the embrace of scaled coils.

 

"It's almost a living thing, is it not?" He's watching her carefully, her thoughts a dark mirror unveiling reflections that only he can decipher. "What lies between us. It breathes. It has a pulse. Or perhaps—" He raises a hand to his face and she starts as she feels rough, warm leather cup her own cheek. A phantom touch from the young lord of this dreamlike world. "Perhaps it is your heart that I hear. When I sleep. When I fight. When I take my pleasure." He sounds oddly wistful. "I _do_ understand why you came to me. There are also times when your eyes in my head are like a fever that I want to claw out. But it has been calmer since we landed here on Lethe. Have you noticed?"

 

She gathers silence to her like a cloak; they may not know how to lie to each other, but she doesn't want to just _agree._ The windows of this level are covered in ornate whorls of metal that allow spangled glass-sheeted glimpses of the sky outside. They throw eldritch patterns on Kylo's face, watery obsidian crosses and filigrees that run along his pale cheeks and flow into the ink-stains of his eyes. By contrast, the darkness of his thick hair is threaded through with silver light; he is a wraith trapped in the hallways of her half-remembered dreams, and she—

 

— _refuses_ to be adrift any longer, she needs to have _control—_

 

A snarl rattling loose in her throat, she extends her arm and pushes him to his knees with the Force. He bends as easily as he did on Jakku, below the cyclone of all those birds, only this time he's at her feet instead of around her. The walls of his fortress shiver with excitement; driven by wrath, she opens herself up to the jagged Dark and lets it fuel her as she lashes out at the bond in a way that she's never been able to before.

 

In this star-dusted castle, on this false planet in Wild Space, Rey holds Kylo Ren in Force-grip, but— there is another plane of reality where she is wrangling with a serpent's coils, crushing its head under her boot. Power is curdled on her tongue, tasting faintly metallic and— _familiar,_ like she's always been meant for this. She hears the voices again, that grating chorus, that language long gone. _Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha._ The bond hisses and trembles, and Kylo's wide eyes burn like the black flames in her heart as he tilts his face up to her and parts his shadow-netted lips.

 

"Yes," he croaks, in triumph and in awe, "this is what I wanted to teach you, my scavenger, my _darling,_ my little desert rat—"

 

She slaps him.

 

His neck twists to the side from the strength of her blow; panels of star-kissed hair sweep across his sharp profile. She feels his arousal swirl through her own belly, and that is the warning sign, the alarm that tells her to retreat behind behind locks and onyx before this gets out of hand.

 

However, when he turns to her once more and pulls her deeper into the mire of his thoughts, she can't help but be transfixed as she sees herself through his eyes. While her hair is tied back in the usual three buns, a few strands have come loose to frame her face, tinted pink by the blood rushing to her cheeks. Her expression is uncharacteristically cruel, slivers of red light flashing in the agate of her irises, and, yet— it is the most beautiful that Rey has ever seen herself look. She towers over him, her small frame filling his universe in fractures of light and shadow as the fire engulfs them both.

 

The Dark Side has heightened her senses, has tempered the bond. Vague bits of other lifeforms flicker through her consciousness; his servants lurk in their secret passageways, waiting for his next command. "If they are linked to you as you are to me, will they bow to me as well?" she wonders out loud, intoxicated by all this power, craving even _more._ "Do I have dominion over this world?"

 

Kylo is still on his knees, pressed down by her Force energy, but his lean hips cant at the sound of her voice, as if he is already consumed by thoughts of fucking. "You have dominion over _me,"_ he sighs.

 

Growling, she grabs him by the collar of his cowl and tugs his head up towards her, crushing her lips to his in a searing, brutal kiss.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

The first dream of his that she appears in is shockingly carnal.

 

They're in a valley carved out of red earth, lined with Sith tombs and monoliths and littered with the freshly-hewn corpses of First Order stormtroopers and Resistance fighters alike, the soil drenched in tides of still-warm blood. The two of them stand victorious at each other's backs, chests heaving and red lightsabers blazing in the sunset-hued air. He's wearing his mask, with the hood of his cowl pulled up; _she_ is garbed in black as well, her bare face streaked in the blood of her fallen enemies and the light in her eyes depraved as the long-buried Dark Lords of Korriban croon to her in guttural voices that beat like drums within the tombs.

 

As one, Rey and her _master_ extinguish their blades. Kylo sits down, carelessly kicking aside a dead stormtrooper so that his long legs can spread the way he wants them to. The chill, filtered rasp of his breathing is as ragged and uneven as the edges of his crossguard as he rides the high of bloodlust. He undoes the fastenings of his trousers with shaking hands and the ghosts of the ancient Sith hum in Rey's ears as she watches him wrap one gloved fist around his hard cock.

 

_Wake up,_ she tells him.

 

_I can't,_ he says.

 

Knees splashing into a ruby pool of blood, she crawls toward him. He stares at her avidly through the mask as he strokes himself; once she is within reach, the fingers of his free hand knot into the hair above her nape and _pull._ She yelps from the pain of it and he shoves her open mouth onto his cock. She scrabbles at his leather-clad thighs, her lips stretched around his girth and one of his hands fisted in her hair while the other presses her jaw slack as he forces her head up and down to the rhythm of his spasming hips. There, in a field of corpses, in the light of a dying sun, she gags and slobbers all over him, until he comes with a roar, shooting thick ropes down her raw throat, and she—

 

— opens her eyes in the early morning gloom of her hut on Ahch-To, with an urge to vomit and an _ache_ between her legs.

 

He is still there, but only as a sullen presence in the back of her mind. The bond throbs with mutual humiliation— and, perhaps, the faint echoes of lust.

 

_I will not apologize for what goes on in my dreams,_ he finally tells her. She feels him cling to his resentment, amplifying it in order to drown his shame.

 

The minutes tick by in a slow and endless wave.

 

_I'll get you for that,_ she promises, quiet and lethal.

 

He shivers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I find dream sex a gray area as far as consent goes, so that's why the warning is up there.
> 
>  
> 
> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
>  
> 
> [Atropos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropos) is the oldest of the Fates, who cuts the thread of mortal life.
> 
>  
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
>  
> 
> All foodstuff mentioned is EU-compliant.
> 
> [Force bond](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_bond).
> 
> [MC-140 Scythe-class battle cruiser](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/MC140_Scythe-class_main_battle_cruiser).
> 
> [Teng Malar](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Teng_Malar).
> 
> [Steelpecker](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Steelpecker).
> 
> [Valley of the Dark Lords](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Valley_of_the_Dark_Lords/Legends).
> 
> [Korriban](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Korriban).
> 
> Regarding "Mhi solus tome...", the translation will come up later on in the fic. You're free to Google it but your trash can of an author requests you not to as that would take away from the Dramatic Effect (TM).


	4. CHARON

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delayed update as I have just returned from my extended birthday celebration in Taipei. Thanks to meritmut for the new tag and to the anthology mods for the gorgeous [moodboard](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/post/151221795235/coming-soon-to-now-part-of-the-reylo-fanfiction) and to everyone who has been reading this story so far. Thoughts on this latest chapter would be very much appreciated!

They have kissed many times in the warped channels of their tangled minds, but— quite frankly— the real thing blows it all away.

 

Kylo's lips are warm and pliant as they succumb to Rey's harsh, deliberate movements. The starlight tinting the corridor pulses at her eyelids in frenetic nets of silver and black, while the Dark roils through her veins like a maelstrom of heat. She catches his plump bottom lip between her teeth and _bites,_ hard enough to draw blood, and his mouth opens to her on the crest of a strangled moan. The bond thrills around them, _yes_ and _at last_ and _always_ and _more._ She is all fangs as she ravages him, rivers of salt and metal spilling from his wounds to mingle with the lavender and honey of that strange, jeweled wine.

 

She tastes spice, too, and smoke, and something that is uniquely his— something that she recognizes from the delirium that inflamed this year that they have spent apart. Her Force-grip dissipates and he springs to his feet, wrapping his arms around her waist and hauling her up against him as her toes drag along the floor and he kisses her so fiercely that she feels it in her _cunt._

 

The bond is nearly weeping now, mad with delight, tearing at them with greedy claws. _Higher. Always. More._ She clambers up his body with a scavenger's lithe ease, locking her thighs above his hips and reveling in how he supports her like she weighs nothing. She rolls her tongue beneath the roof of his mouth and he grinds her down on his erection in response. She breaks the kiss, arching back with a gasp; he immediately seizes the opportunity to dip his head into the crook of her neck, sucking at her pulse point, while he flicks his fingers at the door to her room.

 

It is the sound of the Force-activated door sliding open that pierces through the haze in her mind and brings her to her senses. By the time he carries her over the threshold, she has already started wriggling out of his grasp. Once her soles hit solid ground, she hurls him back out into the hallway with a vicious energy blast that knocks him off his feet. She glimpses confusion on his face, and rage and longing, before the door slams shut between them.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

They have more bad days than good ones, but today is good— if only because the entirety of _yesterday_ had been spent screaming at each other across the cosmic wastes. As it is they're simply too exhausted to continue arguing.

 

For now.

 

Rey wanders the serrated coastline of Ahch-To, leaving damp prints on the smooth white sand. The sky is the color of a faded bruise, the wind cold with the promise of rain. To her left, sapphire waves lap at the shore in a ceaseless rhythm that calls to mind the rise and fall of a chest as air is pushed through the lungs. The Teedos believe that sandstorms are the breath of R'iia. Are there ocean gods, too?

 

She chances upon a bed of coral exposed by low tide and wastes no time darting away from the sand and onto the porous, craggy surface. Millions of tiny lives shimmer below her feet, lurking in the crevices as they await the return of saltwater. If she concentrates hard enough she can distinguish the glowing lines that connect them to one another, to her, to the crabs in the tidal pools and the fish in the shallows and then further out, beneath rolling waves, to the giant barnacle-crusted whales that rumble their mysterious songs and the ship-sized cephalopods that lash their tentacles in the unfathomable depths. A vast constellation of life, all intertwined in the Force.

 

The bond sulks, nipping vindictively at her heels. She and Kylo Ren had stretched it thin yesterday, tangling it between their fingers as they fought about what he had done to Han and Finn.

 

_Hiding from levitation exercises, Jedi?_ he asks her now, with no real bite to his tone. He sounds as weary as she feels.

 

She stops in her tracks, chewing contemplatively on her bottom lip. _Did you used to do that, too?_

 

_No._

 

He'd been a serious student— even Luke had said so himself. Gifted, scholarly, and ambitious, which were all fine traits to have if you knew how to balance them right. Unfortunately, Ben Solo hadn't.

 

_Is it everything that you dreamed it would be?_ he prods. _The ocean?_

 

_Yes,_ she replies. _I'll show you._

 

Before he has a chance to mount his defenses, she reels him into the net of life that she wove in her mind. She moves him through the endless galaxy that shifts and flows under the waters of Ahch-To and doesn't stop, not even when he quakes and tries to pull away. It's all dark blue, whale-song and scales and too many eyes, flare of anemones and translucent fins, scuttling claws and snapping teeth.

 

_Rey,_ he begs, and suddenly she sees him as clearly as if he were standing in front of her, head bowed. Large, pearl-like tears drip down the bridge of his nose. No matter where they are— on sandy dunes, in deepest space, amidst green forests, in the heart of metal cities— all humans weep saltwater.

 

She touches his face through the bond, holds it up to the burning Light. A boy's eyes look back at her, lost and terrified. And she tells him what he had forgotten, what she herself didn't realize until too many years had passed.

 

_No one is alone._

 

*

 

She can't sleep.

 

Her room in the castle on Lethe is furnished with lush tapestries, but starlight turns the colors into pale ghosts of themselves. Her bed is huge, covered in sheets of darkest satin and a mountain of eiderdown pillows, curtained by swaths of rich brocade, but the mattress is too soft. She sinks into it as if it were a cloud; it swallows her whole.

 

Dark energy creeps through her like a vine, unfurling static-frayed blossoms in the spaces between bone and skin, muscle and blood. Meditation didn't take— she's too wired, and the bond is restless, prowling the room with a narglatch's ravenous steps.

 

Matters are not helped by the fact that Kylo is— as the vagrants of Niima Outpost would say— _rubbing one off_ down the hall.

 

The two of them have long shrugged off their embarrassment at answering the siren's call of biological needs. Rey still remembers thinking, _To hell with it,_ one storm-tossed night on Ahch-To, when the wind was howling at the walls of her crude hut and Luke Skywalker slept dreamlessly on the other side of the island. She'd shoved her hand down her underwear and sought relief from the tension that had been building up for weeks, moving her fingers as efficiently as possible in the hope that she could get away with it if she were quick enough.

 

However, just as she came, she'd felt Kylo wake up with a start, lifting his face from the pillow it had been buried in hundreds of star systems away. It had been impossible to care back then, as pleasure spiraled from her core like lightning and her cries were drowned out by rain and thunder. When she returned to herself, he was regarding her silently, uncertain, and she'd grumbled, _Oh, it's not like_ you _never do it,_ before she fell asleep a sated mess.

 

Now, here on his worldcraft, in such close proximity to him, it's as if he's moaning in her ear as he palms himself. Tragically, the shared dreams have ensured that she knows all too well how his cock feels in her hands, and in her mouth, and at the apex of her thighs. Her tongue has so often traced the thick vein on the underside of it; her folds have so often run wet as the tip glided and teased. She is all too familiar with the rough pace that he likes, with the whine that escapes through his clenched teeth when he's getting close.

 

It's a truly deplorable state of affairs but at least it will end soon.

 

She is burning with all the frustrated need left over from what happened in the hallway and the Dark Side has sunk tenterhooks deep into her flesh. _Dzwol shâsotkun,_ it croons, and it galls her that she understands— that she has been put in the position of understanding. She should never have agreed to come here. She hadn't wanted to perish in outer space, but that seems like the preferable option now.

 

Another minute passes, Kylo's breath ghosting over the shell of her ear, his arousal heightening hers. Rey can't ignore it anymore, this itch that _demands_ to be scratched. She's fairly certain that they've never done this at the same time before but one of them will die tomorrow, anyway. This is their last night together.

 

It's almost _romantic._

 

The bond pricks its ears as Rey shimmies out of her leggings and her underwear. She tugs her shirt up to her clavicle, exposing her breasts to the night air blowing in through the window. _I can't believe I'm really going to do this,_ she thinks, even as she plucks at one nipple while her other hand snakes down her body.

 

In his own room, Kylo freezes, one fist halfway up his hard length.

 

_Don't let me stop you, by any means,_ she informs him with a casual breeziness that belies the way her heart rate speeds up.

 

_I wasn't about to,_ he gripes.

 

But it's not until she slips a finger into her damp heat that his hand begins to move again— slower, more leisurely strokes, as if he's waiting for her to catch up to him. _Oh, good,_ she sniffs. _I was afraid that this_ couldn't _get any more awkward._

 

He chuckles; it sounds dangerously close to affectionate.

 

At first, she pursues her climax with grim determination, trying to shut him out as much as she can. However, the mental barrier requires focus to maintain, and there's not much of _that_ left to go around when her thumb is drawing patterns on her clit. It's not long before she gives up on shielding and the bond envelops her like a warm summer lake as she thrusts her hips against the heel of her palm.

 

She senses the moment that he also fully surrenders to the connection. Their Force signatures collide and blur together, and—

 

— _she can_ see _him—_

 

Rey licks her lips. Kylo's naked body is on top of hers, one hand planted heavily beside her pillow while the other tugs furiously at his cock. This isn't real. She _knows_ that this isn't real, but neither is it a dream. They have definitely never done _this_ before.

 

In the shivering night, amidst satin and brocade and eiderdown, in a fortress carved from onyx and bone, they stare into each other's eyes as the slap of skin on skin fills the room. He is a young god above her, made of starlight, sweeping her into his black-sky gaze. He isn't really there, but she can feel the heat radiating from his sinews, can smell his musk of rain and smoke and sweat and honey wine. She's squeezing her breast frantically, digging her fingers deep inside of herself. His hips are quivering slightly between her bent knees, the muscles of his abdomen contracting with every stroke. This isn't how it's supposed to go. This is the _consequence_ of being trapped in someone else's head for a year, dreaming the same dreams.

 

She can almost taste the impending orgasm, sweet and electric. Her hand leaves her breast to fist into the sheets. She's whimpering now, utterly debased beneath him. She needs just a little something more to fall over the edge, but she doesn't know what—

 

He leans down, the tip of his cock nudging at her throbbing clit, making her hiss. "Come for me, _cyar'ika,"_ he murmurs, his voice low and hoarse against the line of her jaw.

 

Her eyes fly wide open. Her spine arches off the mattress as the world dissolves into bursts of white heat. A name is torn loose from her throat and rolls inexorably off her tongue. _"Ben,"_ she gasps out loud.

 

His breath stutters, his hips jerking sharply within the cage of her thighs. He comes with a groan, spilling all over her bare stomach. He isn't really there, but she feels the hot, sticky mess coat her skin, anyway.

 

_Who dies tomorrow?_ she slurs into the bond.

 

_I don't know,_ he replies, sounding just as dazed.

 

She collapses back onto the pillows in a boneless heap. Exhaustion claims her even before her breathing has returned to normal— but, right before she falls asleep, she swears that phantom lips brush against her forehead. Light and wistful, like someone's long-lost dream of touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Charon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28mythology%29) ferries the souls of the newly deceased across the rivers separating the world of the living from the world of the dead.
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [Narglatch](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Narglatch/Legends).
> 
> _Dzwol shâsotkun_ from the Code of the Sith means "There is only passion."


	5. THANATOS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four more chapters to go, folks! Thank you for all the comments, bookmarks, kudos, and hits!

The next morning, they break their fast in the dining room that is now tinted a watery reddish-gray hue by the rising sun. His servants bring out steaming cups of caf and platefuls of breadroot patties soaked in egg yolk, crispy tailring bacon, Reythan crackers with Souse-mustard tapenade, and cross-sections of a type of fruit that Rey has never seen before. It is round, with skin the color of a fierce blush and a spongy pulp as white as snow, bursting with clusters of slick, gem-like seeds that gleam wine-red in the ashen light.

 

"If you _ever_ call me by _that name_ again," Kylo abruptly grits out, "I'll—"

 

"Kill me? Well, today's your chance," she interrupts in a harsh tone. She used to think nothing of waking up at the crack of dawn, but _he_ is not a morning person; somewhere along the way, his crankiness transmitted to her as well. "Besides," she continues, eyes narrowing, "I've never seen _or_ felt you come that much before, so it would appear that you liked it."

 

"Not as much as you liked me calling you by that endearment you pretend to despise," he retorts.

 

"I _do_ despise it. For the lie that it is. I am not your beloved."

 

_Aren't you?_

 

The thought flares through the bond, carrying more weight than he must have expected when he sent it out— his mouth tightens in a stern line, as if he knows that he has been reckless. The two of them drop their gazes from each other and concentrate on their food.

 

Rey drinks the caf but she sticks to the veg-meat from her satchel for no reason other than to annoy Kylo. She is self-destructive when it comes to him; she feels like she would willingly set herself on fire if it meant that he would burn along with her. However, her gaze keeps flickering to the strange fruit on the table, split open like a platter of human hearts. She wonders if the seeds taste as juicy as they look.

 

He follows her line of sight. "Won't you have a pomegranate, at least?" he cajoles. "They grow only in this system. Like the asphodel."

 

"I suppose that _they_ symbolize something, too," she mutters.

 

"Yes."

 

"What?"

 

He leers. "Fertility."

 

She flicks a crumb of veg-meat at him. He doesn't bother to dodge and _that_ is her reminder that, like her, he has been forged in battle. When various projectiles are being aimed your way on a constant basis— often at the same time, and from all sides— you pick up the habit of discerning what is harmless and what is not. What you will _allow_ to hit you.

 

Once the meal has inevitably drawn to a close, his servants escort them out of the castle— but go no farther than just past the doorway. He doesn't want an audience, and neither does she. Slitted topaz eyes watch their retreating forms make for the asphodel meadows.

 

*

 

Dawn on Lethe is a blur of bruised pastel hues, the grays and pinks of the cloud-streaked sky trickling into the pale gold crack of this worldcraft's miniature sun as it peeks over distant mountains. In this light, the long grass shades to cobalt, smearing damp patches of dew onto the fabric of Rey's leggings, while the fluted blossoms all around them beam an iridescent silver and sway in the breeze.

 

She and Kylo Ren take their positions in the middle of the field, surveying each other across a distance of perhaps fifteen steps. His black armor renders him skeletal, an illusion enhanced by the sunken indigo crescents under his eyes and his dark hair blowing loosely about his gaunt cheeks. The scar that she gave him catches the sun's faint rays like a firebrand. He looks as if he already has one foot in the grave.

 

"Where is your mask?" she asks.

 

"You do not wish to see this old face one last time?" he drawls, quirking an eyebrow.

 

She slides her blade-hilt from its holster. "A smart-mouth until the very end."

 

He mirrors her actions. "Yes, you _hate_ my mouth _very_ much."

 

"Switch _off."_ But she's fighting back a smile, and she realizes that she will miss him. Whether this ends in his death or in hers, she will carry the memory of his odd humor and his sullen gaze throughout the rest of the war or into the Netherworld of the Force.

 

"Is it truly such a terrible thing," he murmurs, "to have me in your head?"

 

"I will never join you and you will never come back with me," she hisses. "I can't forgive you, but I can't truly hate you. I don't know what I'm doing. I know only that I can't do it anymore. There's your answer."

 

He nods, his lips curving in a wan, lopsided smile. "So be it, Jedi."

 

A scarlet crossguard shrieks through the grass as his two-handed opening stance points the blade to the earth. The grating sound is swiftly joined by the resonant hum of the ice-blue saberstaff that she slants in the air above her head. He had been with her when she took the _Falcon_ to Ilum in search of Adegan crystals; she'd felt him peering through their link, watching her breath emerge in white puffs on that frozen planet. Once she began construction on her lightsaber, he had recited along to the old words, his thoughts a sad, wistful echo of her own. _The crystal is the heart of the blade, the heart is the crystal of the Jedi, the Jedi is the crystal of the Force—_

 

"The Force is the blade of the heart," Kylo Ren whispers amidst the asphodel.

 

They lunge for each other at the same time. The bond drifts through the air like the smoke from a funeral pyre.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

She likes the dreams where she's lying on her side and he is pressed up against her back, kissing her neck and fondling one breast while he rocks into her from behind. There is a certain _deniability_ to this position; as long as she can't see his face, she can pretend that he is faceless, just one of a vague sea of half-conjured lovers.

 

She doesn't like the dreams where he is in control, leaving red handprints on her backside and making her beg for every orgasm. However, she looks forward to them because they fuel her ire enough for her to retaliate with savage fantasies of her own— dreams where she tears his pale skin to pieces with her teeth and her nails, dreams where she doesn't allow him to touch her body at all and he looks at her as if she were the last drop of water left in the desert.

 

Rey's _favorite_ dream, though, occurs a month before she follows Kylo to Lethe. They're in an orchard— or, perhaps more accurately, in what she imagines an orchard would look like. The sunlight falls green-gold as it filters through verdant leaves and spills down fecund vines and branches swelling with fruit. It's high summer, everything warm and lazy and engorged, and she is naked on a wrought-iron chaise lounge furnished with beaded cushions; her hips nearly hang off the edge, her legs hooked over his bare shoulders, his face buried between her thighs. The air smells like honey and earth and ripeness and sex as his tongue eagerly delves into her folds. She lolls her head back, lets the sunlight pool on the hollow of her throat, fists one hand in the waves of his luxuriant black hair when he wraps his lips around her clit and sucks. She writhes against his mouth, her toes curling.

 

_"Mhi solus tome,"_ she murmurs. _"Mhi solus dar'tome."_

 

_"Mhi me'dinui an,"_ he groans into her cunt. _"Mhi ba'juri verde."_

 

She wakes up from this dream with a heart like glass, the world behind her eyes as ripe as summer.

 

*

 

After a series of experimental slashes and wary ripostes— just to work up a sweat and get into the rhythm— his crossguard catches her saberstaff in one of its right angles, locking their blades for a brief moment before she _spins_ and her other beam slices across his back. One more mark to layer over all the others. _To burn away everyone else who came before._

 

He recovers quickly, closing the space between them with an overhead strike so powerful that her teeth ring when she blocks it. Forcing his blade to the side, she scrapes her own down its length and uses it as leverage to vault over his head and score another glancing blow on his arm. He switches to one-handed grip then, a wild swing that carves a diagonal path down her stomach. She screams, instinctively lashes out with the Force— he is blasted off his feet, but, no sooner has he fallen into the long grass when his off-hand whips up to telekinetically pull her towards him. She manages to twist enough to be able to land with her elbow to his nose. There's a satisfying crack of bone; before she can revel in it, he's suddenly flipping her onto her back, both their lightsabers rolling away, forgotten for the moment.

 

Blood from his broken nose drips onto the corner of her mouth. Her tongue instinctively darts out to lap it up and he watches her do it, his brown irises fringed with splinters of red light. The metallic taste ignites the Dark lingering in her system— she _grins_ at him, flicking her ruby-stained tongue like a lewd invitation.

 

He falls upon her with a snarl, his teeth sinking into her neck. She rakes her nails into the fresh saber-wound on his back and he _moans_ and _thrusts_ against her, the bond a blazing inferno engulfing their tangled limbs and the Dark Side crawling over their flesh like black water. He coaxes welts of blood from her throat, swirls them onto his hot, wet tongue until she can no longer tell the difference between pleasure and pain, fighting and fucking, and then—

 

— the sun rises over the mountains, suffusing the grassy field in a golden wash. The rays slice into her eyes, blurring her vision but bringing a stark moment of clarity, a sharp point on which her mind can hone itself—

 

_There is no emotion, there is peace._

 

Rey pushes Kylo off of her and leaps to her feet and _runs_ , summoning her lightsaber into her palm as she goes. When she turns back to face him, he is already standing up, scarlet blade-light bleeding onto his features. When their beams clash once more, it is relentless and desperate, a seesaw of ruby and sapphire amidst feathery silver currents as their wild strikes cut through the asphodel stalks.

 

When he stabs her through the stomach, he leaves himself wide open for the blade that she plunges into his chest.

 

A slow, sorrowful lament ripples through the bond.

 

They twist away from each other, Kylo immediately collapsing to his knees on the ground. Rey is still on her feet, but barely. She staggers toward him, feeling her own life-force ebb even as she prepares to take his with one last strike. His face is blood-streaked, gray-tinged. His eyes are endless night, blinking at her through sweat-clumped lashes. Her saberstaff slashes through the dawn, and—

 

— _stops,_ humming a hair's breadth away from his neck—

 

"You have flown so far," he mutters. "Let me go."

 

"I can't," she says.

 

She thinks that she sees anger distort his ruined features, right before she drops her weapon and falls next to him, the grass rising up to meet her like an ocean of dew.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

He's in his chambers on _Judgement,_ the _Arquitens-_ class light cruiser that serves as the primary mode of transport for the Knights of Ren. She watches from a salt-hollowed Ahch-To cave as he turns his back to the mirror, inspecting over his shoulder the new marks gouged there by the latest Darksider ritual.

 

Her mouth is dry, her gaze fixed on the lines that spill bright red over existing scar tissue. _Why do you do this? Why do you let them?_

 

_Pain is instructive,_ he replies.

 

_You would have done this to me, too? Had I joined you?_

 

He hesitates but they can never lie to each other. _Yes. It would have made you strong._

 

_There are other ways to channel the Force._

 

His eyes shift from the mirror. To the rain of stars beyond the transparisteel canopy. _Those ways are lost to me now._

 

*

 

Sprawled next to him on the fields of Lethe, she drifts in and out of consciousness, her pulse vague and too slow, the sunrise sweeping fiery arcs over the asphodel in the same way that the _Millennium Falcon'_ s glare had once hewn at a shell of snow and night.

 

Eventually, she becomes aware of movement, of being lifted up in arms that are the color of ocher and not entirely human. _There's nothing you can do,_ she attempts to tell his servants.

 

_Remember the desert, Mistress._ Their voices in her head are as dry as dust. _Remember how you fought and screamed and would not die._

 

She feels around for the bond. It's still there, faint like a faraway signal received through the interference of an ion storm. It flares weakly in her mind as she is carried into the nightmare fortress, into halls of darkness and silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
>  
> 
> [Thanatos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatos) is the personification of Death.
> 
>  
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
>  
> 
> [Ilum](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ilum/Legends).
> 
> [Adegan crystal](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Adegan_crystal).
> 
> [Traditional Jedi lightsaber ceremony](http://rpg.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blade_is_the_Heart_of_the_Jedi_%28Lightsaber%29).
> 
> [Arquitens-class light cruiser](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Arquitens-class_light_cruiser/Legends).


	6. NYX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remain bowled over by the response to this story. Y'all are great! A few song recs: [Hate Me by Eurielle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcnck5aAewM) (suggested by meritmut), [Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbbtmskCRUY) (suggested by aknightfornawt), and [Mirrors by Natalia Kills](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4By_cfI_1g) (suggested by royalbk). The official [masterpost](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/post/151841246182/reylo-fanfiction-anthology-fics-masterpost-and) of the Reylo Fanfiction Anthology has also been released and I'm crying, I'm so honored to have been a part of this.
> 
> Please let me know what you think of this installment! Reviews help me fine-tune the story and kick my ass into updating faster <3

Her sedative-laced body floats within the glass cylinder of the tank in the castle's medbay, submerged in warm, bluish slime. Tiny, viscous bubbles intertwine like strands of pearls through the brown smoke of her loose hair. She doesn't know how much time has passed, how long she has been looking down at herself, but it feels like eons, century after century crumbling to dust while she sleeps. When they finally pull her out, surely the war will exist as nothing more than a holographic record and the constellations will have rearranged themselves into newer, stranger shapes.

 

Surely, she will be free.

 

Kylo is in the tank next to hers, his pale skin ethereal in the bacta's glow. Repose brings out the innate softness of his features— he looks gentle, younger. She doesn't think she will ever find him truly handsome but perhaps he is not unattractive.

 

_Thank you. I think._

 

She tries to be annoyed that his consciousness has brushed against hers, even here in the depths of their bacta tank dreams, but it's hard going. She distracts herself by peering at his face through the glass.

 

_You have big ears,_ she gripes.

 

_Big nose, too,_ he muses. _You might have done me a favor by breaking it._

 

She squints. _Seems to be healing nicely._

 

_Yes. Well._

 

The medbay disappears, black walls turning into gilded pillars that slope up to a high, domed ceiling made of transparisteel. Stars shine down on a crowd of laughing, smiling people draped in gems and silks, conversing in pleasantly-modulated voices over glasses of sparkling wine.

 

Rey's breath catches when she sees Leia Organa, chestnut hair coiled in the elaborate braids that she'd worn as Republic senator. She's holding court in the middle of the ballroom, surrounded by fawning sycophants. Her son stands stiffly just behind her, in a tailored navy jacket threaded through with shots of gold. In this dream, _Ben_ can't be older than seventeen, a lanky, awkward shadow trailing in his charming mother's wake.

 

"Young master Solo." One of the nobles from the Alderaanian diaspora inclines his head. Earlier, he'd snidely referred to Ben as _"that smuggler's son"_ when he fancied himself out of earshot, but he is all airs and graces now. "It is my understanding that you have apprenticed to your uncle. House Thul looks forward to the rise of a new Jedi Order."

 

"How kind," Ben remarks, "considering that House Thul was once allied with the Sith Empire."

 

The nobleman stalks away, muttering under his breath. Ben turns to Rey, as if he has just noticed her presence. "I like this dream, you know."

 

She snorts. "I can imagine why."

 

"No. Watch." As if going through the motions of memory, Ben steps on the hem of Leia's white gown. He's quick to apologize, a red flush creeping up his neck, but Leia touches his cheek with a tender smile and tucks her arm into the crook of his elbow.

 

"You see?" Ben looks at Rey again, smiling ruefully over the top of his mother's head. "This is the dream where she forgives me."

 

The ballroom morphs into the cramped, musty interior of the AT-AT that lies on its side in the Goazon Badlands. Rey's head is bent over a salvaged metal canister as she carefully pats sand over the roots of a prickly green spinebarrel.

 

"You were ready to give up," Kylo says. The gangly teenager is gone; he is dressed once more in his black regalia. "The work was thankless, and hunger and thirst ate at your bones until there was nothing left. But, when you came across _this,_ you realized that anything can grow on Jakku. Even yourself."

 

"I wasn't about to be bested by a plant, now, was I?" Rey mutters.

 

She straightens up and motions for him to follow her outside, but he's too busy examining the various knickknacks scattered around her makeshift home. Exasperated, she laces her fingers through the gloved gaps in his and tugs him out of the dim, gray bolthole— into the searing amber heat. Her hand feels impossibly small and fragile in his, and she isn't sure if she likes it or not; her confusion is reflected by the look on his face as he stares down at where they are joined.

 

"Oh, come on," she tries to jest, "haven't you ever held hands with a girl before?"

 

"Never," he quietly admits. "You're the first."

 

She doesn't wrench free of his grip, like she thought she would. Perhaps there are some things that she can allow herself, in this nebulous place where it's only them. "This isn't real, anyway."

 

"It's not," he agrees. He looks up from their intertwined fingers, his solemn gaze trawling ridges of orange rock and swirls of molten dunes. "I dream of deserts, too."

 

The canyon falls away. There's hardly a shift in terrain, save for the silhouettes of distant mountains in different places, but there are now two suns hanging in the sky. A small boy is standing a few meters in front of them, peering through a fringe of sandy hair. The back of Rey's neck prickles; all manner of people pass through Niima Outpost on their way to somewhere else and she's learned to recognize the wild, defiant eyes of runaway slaves.

 

"Years from now, I will make all the wrong choices," the boy says to Kylo, whose surprise is a palpable tremor that bursts through Rey as if it were her own. "Years from now, I will not know how to love without fear and the galaxy will quiver before me. I watch you from another shore, blood of my blood, and I pray that death will not be your deliverance, as it was mine."

 

The twin suns rise higher over Tatooine. The boy's shadow lengthens over the glimmering sand, turns into someone else's— someone who appears to be wearing a triangular helmet and a long cloak.

 

Rey _panics._ Almost before she's aware of her actions, she's seized control of the bond and wrestled Kylo and herself out of the dream. They're free-falling, with nowhere to go, his hand still in hers as they slip through endless nets of light and darkness. Blindly, she reaches out, and—

 

— they're standing in the asphodel meadows, windswept, star-kissed.

 

Kylo squeezes her fingers. A silent question.

 

"I took it from your mind," Rey whispers. "I chose a place you loved."

 

*

 

It's a while before he speaks again. When he does, he lets go of her hand, and the loss is bitter and hollow in her stomach— a pain that needs to be breathed out, slowly, through the lungs.

 

"That is not what he usually tells me," he muses. "My grandfather," he goes on to clarify when she says nothing. "In that dream, he usually imparts Sith teachings, or spins me visions of a galaxy united under truth and hard order. You changed it, somehow."

 

"Or _you_ did." She's thinking about their dawn duel, replaying it in her mind. How furious he'd looked when she threw her blade aside. How out of place that had been. _Death will not be your deliverance._

 

The bond is suddenly very tense now. At the other end of it, he has gone still, like an animal feeling another pair of eyes on its throat and unable to decide whether to fight or to flee. She circles him warily, assessing the tangle of his thoughts, gauging which door to open amidst the numerous hallways stretched out in front of her. Before she can decide, however, the grassy field starts to trickle away, like a cloud of smoke dispersing in several directions or a river running into the edge over which it must spill.

 

In realspace, her eyelids twitch within bacta and glass as she slips into another dream.

 

They're in a snow-covered forest, the sky a violent indigo-black through the gaps in the trees. The ground is shaking as she crouches over his body sprawled on the ground, attempting to staunch the wound in his side with her bare palms. They have been here before but not like this.

 

"Wake up," she tells him.

 

"I can't," he says.

 

She buries her face in his chest, his heartbeat fading fast against her cheek. "Don't die."

 

He places one gloved hand over her own. "There is no death, there is the Force."

 

In the darkness his blood blooms between their fingers like crimson petals. The earth on Starkiller Base is torn asunder, panels of snow tumbling down into a fire-razed abyss. This time, she stays with him, instead of watching from the other side.

 

*

 

The dream changes; silky waves of saltwater rush up from the chasm and spill over them until they're drifting beneath sun-dappled blue currents. Her legs are bound in the edges of his cowl, seaweed wrapped around their ankles, fins gliding past them like veils and the song of whales thundering in their ears.

 

"Everything is transmitted through the bond," he reminds her in a soft voice. "Feelings, memories... You have made me dream of oceans, too."

 

She breathes in a rush of silver, which turns into ash in her lungs as the waves harden into cavern walls, smoky with the red-gold flicker of a hundred small fires. They're holding hands again, fingers clasped over one of the glowing pits.

 

"There was an old warrior from Mandalore who told me about this ritual," she says, "once, when I was a child in Niima Outpost. I don’t know why it's always you, in the darkness behind my closed eyes. I don’t know why I give you the words."

 

He kisses her forehead. _"Mhi solus tome."_

 

She raises his knuckles to her lips. _"Mhi solus dar'tome."_

 

And then they're on the _Falcon,_ starlines shivering beyond transparisteel. This time she is a mere spectator, watching as Han Solo teaches _Ben_ how to coax the ship out of hyperspace, callused fingers folding a young boy's hand over the controls.

 

"You have to wait for the right moment," Han advises. "See that light there, on the dashboard? Don't make the jump until it blinks— or else you're going to tear a new one into the hull."

 

"In twenty years' time, I will run my blade through your heart," Ben solemnly tells his father. "You will be my sacrifice. The ultimate test of selflessness, of what I am willing to endure in order to fulfill my destiny. In twenty years' time, I will think that killing you will make me stronger. But your fall will last forever, and I will be wrong."

 

Han tightens his grip on his son's hand. "Wait for the right moment."

 

The light on the dashboard blinks. They make the jump.

 

*

 

Rey and Kylo Ren are in the asphodel meadows once more. She's breathing heavily and he's looking away, his jaw set in a grim line.

 

There had been love in that last dream. Doomed and heartsick, but love, nonetheless. Rey had sensed it in the walls, in the starlines. And now she understands.

 

"Everything is transmitted through the bond," she snarls at him. "Feelings, memories..." The perennial breeze turns into a roaring gale, laying the grass stalks flat on the earth. _"Self-loathing,"_ she hisses. " _Vengeance._ You _wanted_ me to come to you. Our signals crossed and it was your desire for retribution that fueled mine. You lured me into a trap that you set for _yourself."_

 

"I dream of you because you bring my death," he croaks, over the howl of the wind. "Or, at least, I hoped that you would. I did not think that you would waver. Why didn't you do it, Rey?" His gaze turns to her then, bright with bitter tears. "Why didn't you kill me?"

 

_"Because I'm not like you!"_ she yells, horrified by the saltwater that's dripping down her own cheeks, into her own mouth. They are each other's dark mirrors, after all. "I fought tooth and nail for every bit of scrap that I could salvage. I waited for _years_ for a family that never came back. You told me to let you go, but I don't know _how,_ Ben! Because, for most of my life, not letting go was all I had left—"

 

The world around them shudders. Hazy white light rakes brilliant claws into the sky and starts to rip it apart.

 

"Ah." Kylo looks around, seemingly unperturbed by her confession or by the tremors that crack through Lethe as if the Force is pouring into its shatterpoints. "In which we wake."

 

*

 

When Rey opens her eyes, she's flat on her back on a metal table, her bare limbs shaking from the abrupt chill. A silent servant is removing the breathing apparatus from her face. She's spasming, so violently wrenched out of the dream-state, all her senses going haywire. She gasps and sputters and coughs out bacta, breathes in the sweet rush of air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Nyx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyx) is the goddess of night.
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [Bacta](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bacta/Legends).
> 
> [House of Thul](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/House_of_Thul).
> 
> [Goazon Badlands](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Goazon_Badlands).
> 
> [Spinebarrel](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Spinebarrel).
> 
> [Mandalore](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mandalore/Legends).


	7. ELYSIUM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all should know that I blushed the whole time I was writing this chapter and it never quite went away. I now have a bad case of perma-blush. Oh, the things I do for this ship :3 I'm uploading from the car on my way to the airport, comments would be lovely company for me during transit!

They have given her new clothes.

 

Rey stares at the full-length mirror in her room, hardly recognizing the girl who stares back from a panel of glass set in bone. The gown is the color of midnight, with tight sleeves that end in diamond-points past her wrists. The neckline is alarmingly low-cut, the waist cinched to give the illusion of curves. The skirt is lightweight but its silken flare glides along the floor; she has already tripped more than once.

 

She has gleaned from the servants that her own garments are in dire need of washing and mending. _Fortunately,_ every Knight of Ren keeps a spare wardrobe on Lethe, and one of the _ladies_ is just Rey's size. She wonders what this lady looks like, if she is beautiful— the seductive appeal of the gown sets her teeth on edge, for reasons that she cannot fathom.

 

_He is faithful,_ protests one of those dry-as-dust voices in her head. _Only you, Mistress. Only you._

 

Rey glances at the twisted brown shape whose reflection she has caught in the mirror. It's placing a tray of sweetmeats and a jug of wine on the table by the bed and her stomach rumbles. Bacta provides the recuperating body with nourishment, but she hasn't eaten since she surfaced from the tank one day cycle ago. According to her chronometer, she and Kylo Ren were kept under for almost a week, and she feels every second of it in the sluggish trickle of her blood and the uncertain step of her feet on solid ground. At least her appetite seems to have returned.

 

_Is he healed?_ she asks the servant, who nods. _Then tell him that I shall break my fast in the dining room and he had_ better _join me._

 

After a moment's pause, she adds, _Um, please._ He may have given her dominion over this place, but that is no call to act like a brat towards its odd staff.

 

Once the creature toddles off to do her bidding, she sets about to styling her hair. The elastic bands that usually hold her three buns in place are nowhere to be found but there is a sparkling silver comb on the black dresser. It will have to do.

 

Frowning at the mirror, Rey sweeps her hair away from her face and gathers it into a messy pile above her nape. She stabs the comb into it, and exhales a relieved breath when the arrangement holds.

 

*

 

Kylo is already in the dining room when she arrives. He's standing silhouetted against the windows blazing with daylight, dressed in a long-sleeved black tunic with a high collar. He must have tired of waiting for her because he's idly weaving a blade out of pure Dark energy. She notes, with some amusement, that he's wearing arm-guards— as if he fears she might put a fork through his wrist if they happen to reach for the same dish during breakfast.

 

"Trying to impress me now, are you?" she calls out, striding through the doorway.

 

"It depends." He doesn't remove his gaze from the blade as it crackles in the air like a bolt of lightning. "Are you impressed?"

 

"No."

 

He rolls his eyes but the line of his mouth softens, almost imperceptibly. "This is a variant of the Darkshear technique. It was one of the first skills I learned as an apprentice. Luke Skywalker and I had found a Sith holocron during our travels. I managed to commune with the gatekeeper before he could stop me."

 

Even now, she hears the sullen pride in his voice— that he had been able to do, at such a young age, what so many could not. "Your uncle mentioned that, even as a child, your abilities tended to manifest in ways that leaned towards the Dark Side of the Force," she carefully says. "At first, he was hesitant to teach you because of that. But it couldn't be helped any longer. You were hurting people. You were having nightmares."

 

"Yes. I remember the nightmares. Be thankful that you weren't in my head _then."_ The blade looks sharper now than it had been a few seconds ago. "As my training progressed, I began to disagree with the passive way of the Jedi. I could not understand why some teachings were forbidden, why emotion had to be restrained. I saw a galaxy riddled with feckless politicians, crime, and suffering— and there I was, with the power to _fix_ things. But Skywalker was holding me back, and so I forged a path of my own."

 

"You mean Snoke called and you came running, like a little lapdog!" Rey spits out. "He was the one giving you nightmares. He was the voice in your head long before I ever was. He preyed on your insecurities and your loneliness— amplified them until you were warped enough to believe that joining him was the only option."

 

The floating blade swivels over his palms, a comet's streak of starless night against the diamantine radiance of the sun. "I see that my uncle has been unusually _chatty_ as of late."

 

"Not just him. Your mother, too." Her voice cracks. "Your _mother,_ Ben."

 

Without warning he hurls the blade at her. She reacts with lightning speed, uses her own command of the Force to send the projectile veering through the windowpane right next to his head. Glass shatters on the floor. Wind and unfiltered daylight spill into the room.

 

"I told you to _never_ call me that again," he growls, advancing on her menacingly. "Ben Solo is _dead."_

 

"And Kylo Ren _wants_ to die," she retorts, holding her ground. "Because he killed his father. Because he thought he would cast off one more chain by doing so. But it didn't _work,_ did it?"

 

"You don't know what you're talking about—"

 

"I do! You said so yourself, while we were in stasis. Dreams don't lie— at least, _our_ dreams don't." She has to tilt her chin up in order to glare at him. Why does he have to be so kriffing _tall?_ "Listen to me. Snoke was the one who made you do it, right? He promised you power, a galaxy united. But things aren't going as planned, are they? The war continues, an entire star system has been obliterated, and you have nothing to show for it except a dead father. He's been stringing you along. We can fight him _together._ You will have the vengeance you seek. I'll _help_ you."

 

"Shut up," he hisses, towering over her and trembling with pent-up fury. The bond is singing between them, the hallways of his mind rattling with half-formed thoughts— _I can't— It's too late—_

 

"You already betrayed one master," she goads. "I bet you can do it again."

 

_"Shut up!"_

 

_"Make me!"_ she yells, too far gone to heed the dangerous glint in his eyes. "Make me, _Ben Solo—"_

 

He kisses her. It is a harsh, punishing kind of kiss, and Rey gives as good as she gets. For them, the line between violence and sensuality will always be blurred; they are both too hungry and too furious for anything else. She has come to understand that. While it may have been his subconscious desire for an end that helped lead her to his worldcraft, he'd only added to the river of rage that was already boiling inside her. She'd never have come here if she hadn't wanted to.

 

Dark mirrors.

 

Kylo's tongue is a slick, relentless flame in her mouth. His teeth are daggers digging into her lips. She pushes back, bites back, until all she can taste is blood. Her spine bends when he corners her against the table, and she lands on the calciferous surface with a thump, with him stretched out on top of her. He lifts his head to gasp for breath, and then his eyes flicker from her face to the tops of her breasts that are exposed by the gown's scandalous neckline, and then further down, to where the voluminous black skirt has rucked up her thighs as they bracket his hips.

 

"What the _hell_ are you wearing?" he demands, looking absolutely flabbergasted.

 

She doesn't like to admit it, but the delayed reaction is a blow to some long-dormant vanity. "Oh, so _now_ you notice."

 

He smirks, his wide mouth stained with his blood and hers, bright scarlet against his pink lips and his pale chin. She grabs him by the collar and tugs him back down but, this time, he buries his face in her neck. It's not like it was on the battlefield, when he had been a young wolf tearing at her throat— now he contents himself with sucking bruises into her skin and soothing them with his tongue, coaxing dark little blooms of pleasure that shove their roots all the way down to her toes. She turns her head to give him better access, and that's when her gaze falls on the dish of pomegranates on the table, rattling with the grind of his body against hers.

 

The girl she had been on Jakku— that child starved for color and sweetness and beauty— admires how the seeds glow like jewels in the sun, even as the animal that she has become on Lethe writhes and moans as Kylo kisses his way down to her cleavage. It's not long before his hand gropes at one breast, popping it free over the neckline and tweaking the nipple between his fingers. _Oh._ She revels in the strange new delight of dream made flesh until it becomes too much, until she hisses from the overstimulation and he transfers to her other breast, his mouth latching on to the silk-clad nipple and sucking until she's arching up into him and the pomegranates are blurring in splotches of red before her eyes.

 

A part of her wants to weep. How can she be satisfied with mere dreams ever again?

 

"Don't," he mumbles into the swell of her skin, his deep voice thrumming against her heart. His thoughts are slit veins, opened up before her and hers for the taking. Sorrow can come later. For now, there is only this. His hands shake as they tug at her bodice, ripping the delicate seams down her sides. Soon, both her breasts are hanging obscenely out of the gown and he's crushing them in his large palms, watching with fever-bright eyes and grinding the hard length in his trousers against her wet undergarments.

 

"I want to come on your tits," he rasps, like the depraved, pathetic creature that he is, and perhaps she is no better because she _clenches_ in delight at the mental image. "Let me come on your tits, _cyar'ika."_

 

She is no better, but she will not be bested. Pride demands that this be an act of mutual downfall.

 

Rey pushes Kylo off of her and sits up on the table, hiking her skirt further above her waist. "Earn it, _my lord,"_ she sneers.

 

His eyes go wide, the pupils blown out by arousal. A needy little whimper escapes from his throat as he eagerly sinks to his knees before her, as he always has, as she wants him to always will. He slides her underwear down her legs and presses a reverent kiss to the inside of her thigh before finding her center, before licking a hot, wet stripe up her dewy folds; she nearly jerks off the table, would have toppled over in a graceless heap had his broad shoulders not been there to brace her against the edge. Her ankles hook loosely at the small of his back and her fingernails rake into his scalp as his tongue swirls patterns against her cunt, before darting _inside,_ and, _oh,_ would that it be like this forever _,_ the sun's rays burning through her fluttering eyelids and a man worshipping between her legs amidst the echoing halls of a castle in Wild Space.

 

The orgasm is a sudden, vicious wave of lightning that almost snaps her spine in half, her hips canting into his sinful mouth and her fingers twisting into his hair. She's boneless in the aftermath, doesn't even struggle when he gets to his feet and flips her onto her stomach. The dish of pomegranates is in her field of vision again, her cheek pressed to the table as she listens to the sound of him pulling his tunic over his head and easing his trousers down his hips, the sound of silk and seams bursting as he tears the gown off of her and, finally, the sound of his ragged breathing as he hauls her lower body past the edge of the table and pries her legs apart.

 

He crouches over her, trailing loud, sloppy kisses from the point between her shoulder-blades to the base of her spine, one hand alternating between caressing and pinching the curves of her ass, the rough material of his arm-guard occasionally scraping along her sensitive skin. She doesn't recognize this person that she has turned into, this stranger inside her body that's undulating below him and begging to be ruined— however, before the fear and uncertainty can take hold, he's murmuring her name in her ear, over and over again, a ceaseless hymn of longing, so gentle compared to the way he wrenches her shoulders back, forcing her to prop herself up on her elbows.

 

He plunges into her with one long stroke, burying himself to the hilt. Her jaw goes slack at the pressure, the fullness. While she's soft and slippery wet from her climax, it's still a tight fit, the bond shrill on both their ends. But, if they can fight each other through pain, they can fuck through it as well, and it's equal parts discomfort and gratification, _yes_ and _at last_ and _always_ and _more,_ the slap of skin on skin filling the dining room as he ruts into her from behind like the animals that they are.

 

Soon, her pleasure starts to build and the Dark crescendoes along with it. She knows that she can't lose her mind again— she will not share his fate, no matter how beautifully he's begging her to. _There is no passion, there is serenity,_ she tries to recall, but the words are drowned out by her own whimpers as he thrusts harder, his hips snapping against her ass in a vicious pace that knocks the breath from her lungs.

 

Desperate for something else— _anything else—_ to focus on, she fumbles for the dish of pomegranates, pops one of the seeds between her lips and bites down so greedily that the clack of her teeth is audible even through the hazy, primal sound of sex. It explodes on her tongue, flooding the inside of her mouth with juice, the most delicious thing she's ever tasted. She closes her eyes and reaches for another seed, humming at the sensation, at the absolute _decadence_ of swallowing sweet nectar while she's being held down and fucked.

 

When he notices what she's up to, Kylo's moan of pure need shades close to disbelief, like he had thought it impossible for his lust to spike even higher. The silver comb in Rey's hair clatters onto the table, dislodged as he wraps a section of her brown locks around his hand and pulls her up towards him, setting his lips to the line of her jaw.

 

"We are one when together," he grunts and she inhales sharply upon recognizing the ancient vow from their dreams. He wedges himself deeper inside her, an achingly slow thrust this time, accompanied by a sinuous swirl of his hips. "We are one when parted."

 

Rey cranes her neck in order to press a sloppy kiss to the corner of his mouth. "We will share all." Her words emerge somewhere between a gasp and a sigh as she grinds back against him. "We will raise _warriors—"_

 

*

 

It ends with her on her back, one leg thrown over his shoulder while he languidly rocks into her as their tongues roll pomegranate seeds into each other's mouths. The rubies burst between their lips and slide down their throats like droplets of wine-colored light; the bond twines around their bodies and blooms golden flowers everywhere her skin touches his.

 

He brings one hand to where they are joined, coaxing her over the edge one more time. She grabs another pomegranate seed and feeds it to him, their gazes locked as he sucks at her fingers, as he strums at her clit. She peaks with a soft cry, which is soon muffled when his mouth slants over hers. He kisses her lazily through her aftershocks, tasting like pomegranates and like her, and then he's pulling out and clambering onto the table, caging her sternum between his knees as he pumps his cock over her chest.

 

She's purring in contentment, running her palms up and down his muscled thighs, licking her nectar-stained lips. His eyes dart wildly from her face to her breasts, like he's panicking because he can't decide what he wants to be looking at when he comes—

 

_Or you could come in my mouth,_ she thinks, flashing him a wicked grin.

 

Through the bond, she feels his heart skip a beat at the mental image, feels his orgasm spiral through him as he hunches over her and splatters the valley between her breasts with come. She's unable to hold back a moan of her own when he drags the leaking tip of his cock along her nipple, painting it white, marking her irrevocably as his.

 

The table shakes as he collapses on top of her, utterly spent. He hides his face in the hollow of her throat and she wraps her arms around his neck, carding her fingers through his hair. She thinks about the way she had been able to unravel him with the mere thought of her mouth, marvels at how much she is _wanted._ It's a fierce and heady sensation, sweeter even than the pomegranate seeds.

 

She giggles, a carefree sound of girlish delight that prompts him to absentmindedly nip at her collarbone. Now the bond is an ocean in the sunlight, but she no longer feels like she is drowning. She breathes it all in.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

The first time he calls her his beloved, it's five months after the bond has made itself known and they are floating together in a dream of space. A sun is dying just outside the viewport, black splotches expanding into whirlpools within a circle of shivering, molten gold. He's telling her about the ship they're on, an EF76 Nebulon-B escort frigate that had, in the days of the Empire, served as the flagship of the Rebel Alliance. Solar flares unfurl before her eyes as his clipped, academic voice drones on about Kuat Galaxy-15 ion engines, Delphus JC-671 shield projectors, Phylon Q7 tractor beams...

 

"Why are you telling me all of this?" she blurts out.

 

He scowls at her for several long moments but, because their dreams can't lie, he finally says, "This one always ends right before that sun goes nova. I _may_ be trying to draw it out for a little while longer."

 

"So you can watch the sun die?"

 

He shrugs.

 

In this dream, she thinks that maybe he's trying to buy more time with her, but that is a foolish notion. Unacceptable even. She lets him rattle on about the Plat Dromma targeting computer, the Fabritech wide-range sensor system, and the Borstel RH8 laser cannons, until the dying star begins to crack apart, lines of white light covering it like a grid.

 

"What's this ship called?" she asks. "You never said."

 

"The _Salvation,"_ he murmurs. "Farewell, _cyar'ika."_

 

Her brow creases in annoyance, but, before she can retort, the sun explodes in waves of radiant heat. The dream ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Elysium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium), or the _Isles of the Blessed_ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [Darkshear](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darkshear).
> 
> [The Salvation](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salvation_%28Nebulon-B%29).


	8. ORPHEUS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really should be faster at updating but I've been so busy! Thank you, darling readers, for your patience. I hope that you all enjoy this penultimate chapter :)

The gown is a lost cause, torn to mere ribbons of black silk. He pulls up his trousers and lends her his discarded tunic; it hangs loosely off of her slim frame, draping almost to her knees. As she gathers up her hair and sticks the silver comb back into place, she senses a newer, more languid pleasure stir within him at the sight of her wearing his clothes. She wonders if it is normal for a lover to feel this way.

 

In unspoken agreement they abandon breakfast and head for his chambers. He lasts until the first step on the staircase before putting his hands on her again, scooping her up into the wide cradle of his arms. Another memory flashes through the bond: woods and smoke and the first time in years that he held another warm body so close to his own. It galls her to be reminded of her own helplessness, so she sinks her teeth into his clavicle with more punishment than passion, earning her another one of his dark scowls.

 

Even so, by the time they reach the second level of the castle, she's curled up against his bare chest, mouthing at the line of his fresh-shaven jaw and reveling in touch and nearness, which are still such new things to her; which she drinks in as greedily as if each mark of contact were drops of water on Jakku. In turn, he mumbles sweet, encouraging words against her cheek: nonsense phrases, soothing sunlit endearments that are such a stark contrast to the violence of their encounter in the dining room. He is just as affection-starved as she is— and just as fearful of the future that they're both resolutely not thinking about now. _There is only this. There is only us._

 

She keeps his tunic on when she straddles him as he lies back on the mattress in a room as opulent as hers is. It's apparent that he has a taste for the finer things in life; perhaps that is another reason the Jedi Path had been so difficult for him to tread. They go slowly this time, with her sighing at the stretch of him as she grinds down. His fingers dig bruises into her hips, to match the ones that his teeth had left on her neck, and he stares up at her as if she is vaster than the ocean and more powerful than R'iia, as if she is all the gods that were and ever will be.

 

When she finally collapses on top of him, he spills inside her for the first time and, oh, how different it is, how infinitely more satisfying compared to the dreams that will from now on be nothing more than pale shadows of this time on Lethe. _Mhi me'dinui an._ He rolls her over onto her back, and soon his tunic has joined his discarded trousers on the floor and he's taking one nipple into his absurdly clever mouth while she hums and traces her name over the scars that criss-cross between his shoulder-blades.

 

He is merciless in _this_ as in everything else, and she sputters in disbelief when his lips travel southwards. She swears that she feels him grin against the inside of her thigh, but, when he peers up at her through his lashes, his expression is haughty.

 

"You _did_ make me miss breakfast, you know," he points out.

 

She laughs. And, somehow, the fact that he can make her laugh is even more dangerous than the way he makes her burn.

 

*

 

The next day cycle's dusk finds them in the asphodel meadows. She's sitting between his legs, reclining against his chest. The servants have washed and mended her clothes, and now his hand idly strokes beneath her shirt, fingers gliding over her stomach.

 

"I have to go," Rey says. "I've already stayed too long."

 

Kylo lowers his head, pressing a soft, slow kiss to her neck. It's a quiet acceptance. He understands duty; he killed his father for it, after all.

 

"Think about my offer," she urges him.

 

_Together,_ the bond sings in silver beams. _We'll destroy Snoke together._

 

He continues to say nothing, opting instead to nuzzle at her cheek. They both know that, if he opens his mouth, he will ask her to stay. They both know that she will be tempted to say yes.

 

She kisses his chin before reluctantly untangling herself from him. He watches in silence as she rises to her feet, catching her wrist just as she starts to walk away. Closing his eyes, he kisses each of her fingertips, and then her palm, and then he lets her go, bowing his head.

 

She looks back at him when she's about to ascend the _Falcon_ 's ramp. He's drawn one knee up to his chest and folded his arms over it in order to shield his face from view. He is a dark and lonesome figure there in the long grass, beneath the faint stars and surrounded by the ghostly flowers of this strange world. It's too much for the heart to hold, and so she lets it go.

 

*

 

She returns to Ahch-To and begs forgiveness from her master for running away. He doesn't pry overly much into what happened; for that, she is grateful.

 

"There is something different about you," Luke muses one windswept morning as they assume opening stances amidst the ruins.

 

Rey _blushes._ A fiery, brilliant shade of scarlet, instantaneous.

 

Luke's storm blue eyes widen. "No, not _that,"_ he hastens to say. It takes longer than usual for him to compose himself. Jedi Master he may be, but perhaps all uncles find it hard to believe that their nephews are full-grown. Perhaps that is something not even betrayal can extinguish.

 

"Your energy is darker," Luke tells Rey, and she stands still and taut as a wire as he continues to study her. "You carry the Dark Side. And yet—" He rubs his chin, looking thoughtful. "And yet," he repeats softly, "you do not let it carry you."

 

*

 

When one more month has passed, he sends her back to his sister. "It's time."

 

Rey nods, packs her things, and goes to war.

 

*

 

The first time she kills someone whose back is turned is on the volcano world of Taenarum. She doesn't even stop to think about it. She does it to save Finn, a stormtrooper rising into the lava-heated air on the point of her blade. It's not until they're being airlifted out and she's scrubbing off the grime of battle that she realizes she has taken measure of another human being and deemed them unworthy to live.

 

She sinks onto the cold tile of the 'fresher and curls up against the wall as hot water sluices down her bare limbs. Kylo watches from his side of the bond, his Force signature nervous and hesitant.

 

_We do what we must,_ he says. _It will get easier._

 

_I don't_ want _it to get easier,_ she snaps. _All lives mean something._

 

He falls silent, peering at her as if she were a new breed of butterfly beating against a glass prison. She had sensed his fierce exhilaration when she ran her blade through the enemy's chest; she senses his reluctant fascination _now,_ as the Light spirals to reclaim her and suffuses their link, turns it inside out with shades of longing. She suddenly wants him here with her. She wants to convince herself that she's more than a murderer. She wants to feel something other than the phantom vibrations of her saberstaff as it skewered that stormtrooper whole.

 

Slowly, Rey parts her legs and slides one hand between them. She closes her eyes and gives herself up to the rhythm of her fingers, here in this little realm of water and tile and vapor. _Tell me—_ she halts the half-formed thought, before deciding to plunge forward because she has nothing left to lose. _Tell me anything._

 

Kylo obliges. It almost seems like his lips are brushing against her ear as he talks her through it. He's gentle at first, low tones singing praises to how her eyes remind him of deep forests and how he's always tracing constellations on her freckles every time he looks at her. He tells her how awe-inspiring her strength is, how her loneliness is a beautiful dark thing that he pins to his heart like a secret, how her Light is something that he craves even as he recoils from it. He waits until she's near the edge, and then he turns filthy, the rough rasp of his voice crooning about how her soft breasts fit perfectly in his hands and how her tight cunt feels like it was made for him. She's lost in a storm of words and sensations, droplets of water clinging to her skin as he coaxes her higher and higher, towards something that transcends the divide of death, towards something that she can hold up to whatever deaths are still to come.

 

_You would lay all worlds to waste and still weep for them,_ he murmurs in her ear, hushed and awed, as if he has arrived at a revelation that he's spent his whole life searching for. _That is where your true power lies._ His breath hitches in tandem with hers as the edge shimmers into view. One more step. _My shipwreck queen. My silent night._

 

Rey falls. And it feels like flying.

 

*

 

Whenever their time zones happen to coincide, they stay up late into the night cycle just talking. She lies on her narrow bunk in the D'Qar barracks and feels Kylo doing the same on Lethe, or on whatever ship he happens to be using at the moment. She usually curls up on her side while he prefers lying flat on his stomach. If he were beside her, his voice would be muffled by the pillows, drowsy and thick.

 

These conversations are, if not exactly _amiable,_ then surprisingly non-antagonistic. They tend to be so sleepy that they forget to argue, which, Rey concedes, is the best that she can hope for in their situation. They talk about everything and about nothing at all. He manages to startle a few more laughs out of her as the months pass, while her own japes occasionally earn a flicker of some tentative, half-formed mirth. In this matter, she suspects that she is the easier one to woo.

 

Some nights, she drifts off mid-thought and he chases her into dreams— which are the same as they always have been, alternating from carnal and chaotic to surreal and soft. But there are times, too, when she is feeling especially unguarded, when she uses her last drift of consciousness to mutter, _Good night._ And then she would feel the stutter in his heartbeat and the tension in his shoulders as he wonders if it would be alright to let himself have this, before he grunts, _Good night,_ in return.

 

*

 

There is another pattern that they fall into, although Rey can't pinpoint exactly when it starts. She wakes up, either from darkness or from dreams of sex or fighting that make her blood sing the same way. She grasps her end of the bond and asks, _Are you there?_

 

And, from wherever he is, on a ship or on a planet, in a room or on some distant battlefield, Kylo always says, _Yes._ It always sounds uncertain, like he's holding something too delicate in hands that are too big, too rough. _I'm here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Orpheus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus).  
> [Taenarum](http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/gallery/taenarum_c.html) is one of the gateways to the underworld.


	9. EURYDICE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This it, friends! We've reached the end of our tale. It was truly an honor to be part of this amazing anthology and I'm indebted to the mods for giving me this chance to grow as a writer. I would also like to thank you, dearest readers, for sticking with me and for all the bookmarks, comments, and kudos. I hope that you'll join me for my next project but, in the meantime, I can also be found on [Tumblr](http://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Until we meet again... <3

When they see each other again it is on Charybdis, last and fiercest of the storm worlds. Their plasma blades hiss in the pouring rain as she drives him backwards, sapphire to scarlet, into the woods. Battle rages all around— lightning-splintered, water-streaked flashes of falling soldiers and exploding ships and here they are in the middle, obscured from view by a tangle of thick trees. Soft, damp earth sucks at their boots as they spar, the bond shrieking in excitement over the howl of the wind. _Patience,_ Rey tells the animal in her chest but it will not be deterred, it has waited six long months to be whole again.

 

Kylo mutters a curse under his breath when his back hits the gnarled tree trunk that Rey pushes him into with a well-placed elbow to the ribs. The expletive is low and cold through the helmet's voice modulator, static-frayed at the edges; Rey shivers, extinguishes her blade, and runs straight at him.

 

The bond spreads dark and fiery wings in the monsoon night when he catches her in his arms. He has yet to switch off his own lightsaber; scarlet heat crackles along her spine as his off-hand drops to her waist and her shaking fingers fumble with the releases of his mask. He has to bend down and she has to stand on tiptoe, and perhaps she would have spared a moment's annoyance for this if there were time to do anything else but devour. Instead, she crushes her lips to his as soon as his bare face is revealed, the mask tumbling to their feet and promptly joined by his lightsaber. He tastes like rainwater and smoke, like  _now_ and  _endless_ and  _yours,_ thunder rolling overhead and the gale whipping through the trees.

 

"Please," she gasps into his mouth.

 

"Yes," he mutters in response, blindly tugging her leggings down her hips.

 

Soon she has let him spin them around until she's the one whose back is pressed against the trunk. Soon she has her fingers wrapped around the hard length that she freed from his trousers and is guiding it between her thighs. Soon the cacophony of storm and battlefield is drowning out her ragged half-screams while his own feverish grunts are being muffled into the crook of her neck, the curve of her jaw.

 

It is lunacy, pure and absolute, but the desperation is so thick that it chokes both their throats and blocks out everything else save for each other. There in the feedback loop of desire and sensation running through them she catches the glint of his thoughts, his wild song of  _madness_ and  _mistress,_ lightning dancing along his pale features and illuminating the jagged scar that she gave him in flashes of white. She scrabbles at his broad shoulders for purchase, clenches her thighs around his lean hips as tightly as she can, admits to herself that maybe she does like the positions when they're face-to-face after all, when he's peppering sloppy, distracted kisses on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose as he fucks her so hard that it makes her teeth ring.  _I don't know when the next time will be, I don't know, eyes on me, please, always, more—_

 

*

 

She's just stepped out of the lunch queue in the Resistance base's mess hall when his end of the bond goes dark. A bowl of gruel slips from her fingers and clatters to the floor, sloshing its contents all over her boots.

 

"Rey?" Finn hurries toward her, all steadying hands on her shoulders and concerned brown eyes. "Rey, why are you crying?"

 

*

 

Kylo Ren is not dead. Once she has calmed down enough, in the solace of her barracks, she trawls the Force and finds no gaping hole where his signature should be. Concentrating on the bond, she sees that his hallways are locked, but not obliterated.

 

He is not dead, but he _has,_ for whatever reason, elected to shut himself off. And, much to her chagrin, she discovers that he is more adept at constructing mental shields than she is.

 

She tries not to think about it so much. The war goes on, and so does Rey. But she no longer dreams— as if, without him, she doesn't know how. She should be grateful for it, perhaps; for the first time in ages, her slumber is uninterrupted, night after night. She can't remember ever being so well-rested. She looks in mirrors and almost doesn't recognize the girl with glowing skin and no bruises under her eyes.

 

She is better off without him, as she had once expected that she would be. What she _hadn't_ been prepared for was the silence. How loud it is. How it gnaws at her like a persistent ache in the back of her skull.

 

*

 

The next time they see each other again, another six months have passed and the war has been brought to Snoke's fortress on the barren ice world of Achlys, deep in the heart of the Unknown Regions. Resistance troops have established a defensive perimeter around Rey and Luke as they extend their arms and pour the Force into the shatterpoints of the towering glacial castle that casts a long shadow over the snow-laden plains.

 

There is a flash of black at the corner of Rey's eye, accompanied by a whirl of red light. But Kylo's stance is defensive, merely deflecting blaster bolts and shoving Resistance soldiers aside as he storms toward her and his uncle.

 

She takes a leap of faith.

 

"Let him through!" she calls out through gritted teeth.

 

*

 

Snoke's fortress collapses in the light of the midday sun, ice walls and towers toppling to the ground like a cascade of diamonds. They make quick work of him after that; he is a startlingly human-sized creature on a broken throne, recoiling from blades of blue and red and the jagged hum of Light and Dark energy combined. Snoke screams when he dies.

 

*

 

"I had to be sure that it was my own decision," Kylo tells Rey as the two of them stand in the ruins of the ice castle, his voice a cold artificial rasp through the helm's modulator. "That’s why I couldn't have you in my head. There are some paths that need to be walked alone."

 

_I missed you,_ she wants to say, but doesn't. She's sure that it's written all over her face.

 

Resistance troops are circling them warily, blasters aimed at Kylo Ren. Even though he helped kill his master, the tide has changed and he is now a war criminal. _Genocide,_ Rey thinks, staring at his expressionless black visage. _You are guilty of genocide._

 

Slowly, he reaches up to press the release on his mask. It falls to the ground with a heavy thud, followed by his lightsaber and she's looking into his eyes again after all this time: night-sky eyes set in sullen features framed by those waves of dark hair that had been so soft in her hands and against her thighs.

 

He closes the distance between them in a few long strides. The soldiers tense, preparing to fire, but someone calmly orders them to stand down— it sounds like Luke but Rey doesn't think to check, fixated as she is on the sight of Kylo falling to his knees before her in the snow. Her saberstaff still hums sapphire at her side, dangerously close to cutting his shoulder when his gloved hands clutch at her hips and he sags forward, burying his face in her mid-section.

 

"You know what must happen," he whispers. "I do not want it to be anyone else but you. Finish what you started on Lethe. Take away this grief."

 

"How can I when it belongs to us both?" She remembers the desert. The twin blades of her saberstaff disappear. "Death will not be your deliverance."

 

*

 

The tribunal decrees exile as punishment. Rey suspects that Leia might have more to do with this clemency than the General cares to admit— if it can even be considered clemency at all. The other Knights of Ren are either dead or fugitives scattered across the galaxy; there is no one to join Kylo on his little worldcraft in Wild Space.

 

A Resistance ship flies him out and returns with the _Underworld_ in tow, effectively trapping him on Lethe for the rest of his days. There is no shortage of those who believe that execution would have been a more fitting end. But attentions are eventually turned elsewhere, to rebuilding and to picking up the pieces. Rey does her duty in these matters as well. Time ticks by as if spent in someone else's skin. It hadn't been her war at first; neither does it feel like her victory now.

 

*

 

The bond opens one morning when she falls asleep in the hangar, having spent half the night repairing several of the more battered X-wings. One minute she's collapsed on the grimy floor, power wrench in hand, and the next—

 

— she's in the asphodel meadows. Wind and starlight, and him towering over her.

 

"This is farewell," he murmurs. "I will allow myself to have this. One last time."

 

She scoffs. "You would devote so much energy to maintaining your shields?"

 

"I would have you in the real world or not at all," he replies in a solemn voice. "Too long have I dwelt on dreams."

 

He opens his arms to her, tentatively, but there is nothing tentative in the way she crashes into him, tucking her cheek against his chest. His fingers curl at her nape and he rocks her back and forth, and she knows that this is how his father held his mother, that this is a gesture of love as he understands such a thing. It all feels painfully _unfair,_ even though he has been granted mercy instead of justice. Then again, what would a Jakku scavenger know of fairness, there on the burning sands? Her life has been spent taking what she could get.

 

"Wake up," he tells her, after a while.

 

"No," she says.

 

*

 

But she does, eventually, one of the pilots shaking her and suggesting that she would be more comfortable in her bunk instead of on the hangar floor. The world goes on, so must Rey.

 

*

 

A memory:

 

In the months that follow the interlude in the 'fresher, her kill count rises. So many fall to her twin blades, and, to her relief, he was wrong in this and it doesn't get any easier. But she does think about him when she lands her fatal blows; she thinks about silver flowers and immortality, about how _there is no death, there is the Force,_ because the Force means that no one is ever truly gone. All things are ensnared in a web of energy that shifts and mutates but is not lost. Everyone we meet, befriend, or, yes, kill— they stay with us, no matter how briefly they brush across our hearts. We all carry one another until the end— which is only a different kind of beginning. _As well, asphodel._

 

In her weaker moments, when it feels like the tides of blood will never ebb, she takes refuge in fictions even as her body waltzes through the forms. She imagines, then, that she is sending all her ghosts to Lethe. And that he waits there to receive them, her pale young lord of death who talks too much and is always lonely. She imagines that she is messenger and consort, that petals of light bloom in the darkness of her footsteps. She imagines that she can take whatever journeys there are to come, as long as they will lead her back to him, someday.

 

*

 

It is summer on D'Qar. She's in the orchards with Finn, the two of them reveling in the scent of nectar and the glow of sunlight. He stares at her as she ducks through an arch overgrown with bright red Tarisian roses, and she stills, wondering if he can see the phantom of somebody else in her eyes.

 

"You've been working so hard," Finn remarks, gesturing at the blossoms all around them, the ones that she helped plant, elaborate mazes of color and fragrance that she had strained her back and worn her fingers to the bone to coax forth. "You look like you could use a vacation."

 

Sometimes epiphany can click in place just like this. It is, in its own way, a blessing.

 

"Maybe I do," Rey says. She knows exactly where to go.

 

*

 

The bond flares to life once the _Millennium Falcon_ noses into Lethe's orbit, setting off the worldcraft's sensors.

 

To her utmost surprise, Kylo doesn't say anything but she can feel him blink. Stunned, wary, hopeful. It's his hope, first and foremost, that finds its way into the shatterpoints of her heart.

 

_I can't stay long,_ she warns.

 

His end of their link stirs, like someone waking up from a long and dreamless sleep.

 

_I suppose that we shall have to make the most of it,_ he finally mumbles.

 

Rey grins. The _Falcon_ 's droid brain trinity chatters away, a discordant song that someone managed to make work, as she coaxes the ship into its planetfall sequence.

 

She doesn't look back.

 

**TELOS**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **GRECIAN REFERENCES:**
> 
> [Eurydice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurydice).  
> [Charybdis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charybdis).  
> [Achlys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achlys).
> 
> **STAR WARS LORE:**
> 
> [Tarisian rose](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tarisian_Rose).


End file.
